Mother on alleged bribery by religious order

A criminal trial will open next month in Italy against members of the Legion of Christ, a disgraced religious order, for trying to obstruct an investigation into an abusive priest.

Prosecutors allege that Legion lawyers and priests tried to obstruct justice and extort Yolanda Martinez's family by offering them money to recant testimony to prosecutors in hopes of quashing a criminal investigation into the abusive priest, Vladimir Resendiz Gutierrez.

Martinez, a mother of three, choked up when she recalled the day she received the phone call from her son's psychiatrist.

It was March of 2013, and her oldest son had been receiving therapy on the advice of his high school girlfriend. Martinez thought she was about to learn that she would be a grandmother.

"A priest calls us, Rev. Guidetti, he is a psychotherapist, and he tells us he wants to talk to us. Obviously our family never thought our son could have ever suffered sex abuse. We actually smiled as parents thinking he got his girlfriend pregnant," said Martinez.

Instead, Dr. Gian Piero Guidetti told Martinez and her husband that during therapy their son had revealed that he had been repeatedly sexually molested by a priest, Vladimir Resendiz Gutierrez, starting in 2008, when he was 12 and a middle schooler at the Legion's youth seminary in Gozzano, northern Italy.

Guidetti, himself a priest, told them he was required by his medical profession to report the crime to prosecutors.

"We sat down in the office of this psychotherapist and he tells us what had happened (the abuse) in Gozzano. We wanted to die. The priest himself told us: I am a priest, but I will be at the police station tomorrow morning to report this," recounted Martinez, with tears in her eyes.

The psychotherapist complaint, and Martinez's own testimony to prosecutors, sparked a criminal investigation that resulted in Resendiz's 2019 conviction, which was upheld on appeal in January.

Resendiz, who was convicted in absentia and is believed to be living in Mexico, has until the end of March to appeal the conviction and six and a-half-year prison sentence to Italy's highest court.

The Vatican defrocked him on April 5, 2013 - just a few weeks after Italian prosecutors first heard about Martinez's son.

Italian police were never informed by the Legion or the Vatican. Italy doesn't require clergy to report suspected child sex abuse.

When police finally did get wind of the case in March 2013, they uncovered elaborate efforts to keep Resendiz's crimes quiet.

After abusing Martinez's son in 2008 Resendiz was sent to Venezuela, where evidence seized by police shows he continued his abuses.

But the investigation, netted evidence that went far beyond Resendiz's own wrongdoing.

Documents by police and seen by AP in the court file showed a pattern of cover-up by the Legion and the pope's envoy that stretched from Milan to Mexico, the Vatican to Venezuela and points in between.

In 2013, Martinez and her family were coping with the trauma of her son's abuse, when a Legion priest very close to the family travelled to Milan to meet them on October 18, bringing a proposed settlement to compensate the family.

They met in a room off the parish playground of the Sant'Eustorgio basilica where Martinez worked.

"He (a Legionary priest Rev. Luca Gallizia) hands us this letter and he puts his hand on mine and says 'read it at home, not here'. We say goodbye, but in the meantime I had taken a peek and I told him 'Rev. Luca there is a sentence that I already don't like'. 'Don't worry' he said, 'you need to read it all together and you will see that we can reach an agreement'. That evening we read it, and that was a second violation for us, both as people and friends of Rev. Luca because he was not only our friend, but also my husband's spiritual father," remembered Martinez.

The document the Legion wanted Martinez's family to sign stated that her son ruled out having been sexually abused by Resendiz, and regardless didn't remember.

It said he denied having any phone or text message contact with him, and that his ensuing problems were due to the fact that he left the seminary and was having trouble integrating socially into his new public high school.

The document set out payments for the son's continuing education and therapy and required "absolute" secrecy.

If the family were called to testify, they were to make the same declarations as contained in the settlement - denying the abuse.

A few months later, the Legion realized it had erred in leaving the proposal with Martinez, and proposed a revised settlement acknowledging the abuse occurred.

Now, though, it required the family to pay back double the 15,000 euro (16,250 US dollar) settlement offer if they violated the confidentiality agreement.

Martinez recalls telling the Legion's lawyers when they presented her with a revised settlement agreement: "It's not just the abuse of a 12-year-old child: you took God from my son's heart. For me, this is very grave."

It was then that Martinez called the Vatican cardinal running the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis.

Then Pope Benedict XVI had entrusted De Paolis, one of the Vatican's most respected canon lawyers, to turn the Legion around in 2010, after revelations that its founder, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, had raped his seminarians, fathered three children and built a cult-like order to hide his crimes.

In 2010, there had been calls for the Vatican to suppress the Legion but Benedict decided against it, apparently determining in part that the order was too big and too rich to fail.

In January 2014, Martinez called De Paolis to tell him the Legion had proposed a second financial settlement for the sexual abuse her son suffered at the hands of one of its priests that seemed highly problematic.

During the January phone call, De Paolis laughed it off and told Martinez to simply not sign the proposed settlement and hash out a better one without lawyers.

A few hours later, on January 8, 2014, De Paolis opened the Legion's 2014 assembly where he formally ended the mandate given to him by Pope Benedict to reform the religious order.

"At that time De Paolis was the envoy sent by the Vatican to the Legion, and they prepared this letter without consulting with De Paolis. However, De Paolis didn't do anything to help us, he was sorry about this, but he said: this is how it gets done here," recounted Martinez, adding she told him she didn't want the money and wouldn't sign the letter.

The wiretapped conversation between the aggrieved mother and De Paolis, as well as the six-page settlement proposal, are key pieces of evidence in the criminal trial opening next month in Milan against Legion's members for obstruction of justice and extortion.

Four years later, in January 2014 during his final Mass as the pope's delegate, De Paolis gave the Legion a clean bill of health, saying it was "cured and cleaned" of Maciel's toxic influence.

De Paolis refused from the start to remove any of Maciel's old guard, who remain in power today.

He refused to investigate the cover-up of Maciel's crimes. He refused to reopen old cases of abuse by other priests, even when serial rapists remained in the Legion's ranks, unpunished.

The effects of his short-circuited reform are now becoming apparent.

Victims of these other Legion priests are coming forward in droves with stories of sexual, psychological and spiritual abuse, and how the Legion's culture of secrecy and cover-up remains intact.

"He (De Paolis) betrayed us for sure. He could have done much more. He should have not completed his investigation saying he had taken the Legion out of the tunnel. He did not take it out of the tunnel, he covered up many things, not only for what concerns us, but also during that year, exactly in those dates many things happened, many other abuses," repeated Martinez.

"I think he did nothing for the victims," she added through tears. "He covered up again the face of the church, he covered up the face of the Legionaries and he lost souls, because they lost many souls. They will have to face God, not me," said Martinez.

De Paolis is beyond earthly justice - he died in 2017 and isn't accused of criminal wrongdoing since there is no evidence he knew of, or approved, the settlement offer before it was made.

But his wiretapped phone call and documents seized when police raided the Legion's headquarters in 2014 show that he turned a blind eye to the superiors who protected paedophiles.

Even when he first learned about Resendiz's crimes in 2011, he approved an in-house canonical investigation but didn't report the priest to police.

And when he learned two years later that other Legion priests were apparently trying to impede the criminal investigation into his crimes, the pope's delegate didn't report that either.

With the trial against two Legion lawyers and three priests set to begin on March 12, Martinez still can't cope with the trauma of what Resendiz did to her son, and what the Legion did to her family also after the abuse.

"My testimony is necessary exactly because they say they are close to the victims and they help their (the victims') relatives. This is my testimony, that this hasn't happened, they contacted us only to say that this (abuse) hadn't happened. I believe in justice, and there is a sentence in the Bible that I really like: truth and only the truth will set you free," she said.

"It's their modus operandi, it's in their genetic structure," said Alberto Athie, a former Mexican priest who has campaigned for more than 20 years on behalf of clergy sexual abuse victims, including victims of the Legion.

"They always try to control victims, minimize them, defame them, accuse them of exaggerating things," Athie told AP at his home in Mexico City.

"Then, if they don't achieve that level of control, they go to the next level, looking for their parents, trying to minimize them or buy them off, silence them. And if that doesn't work, they go to trial," said Athie.

Eventually, Resendiz confessed - but only to the Legion and Vatican authorities, and only about other boys he abused, not Martinez's son.

Lawyers for the five suspects declined to comment.

The Legion says they have professed innocence.

A spokesman said that at the time, the Legion didn't have in place the uniform child protection policies and guidelines that are now mandatory across the order.

(Pic Credit: Pixabay)