Founder of the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi Movement

Marcial Maciel was born in Cotija de la Paz, (in the state of Michoacán, Mexico) on March 10, 1920. His mother, Maura Degollado Guízar, a niece of Saint Rafael Guízar y Valencia, taught her children to practice Christian charity and piety, and to reach out to meet the material and spiritual needs of others.

The people of Cotija at the turn of the century were men and women of deep religious faith, which was shown in various pious traditions and in the flowering of priestly and religious vocations. Six bishops were born and raised in this small town.

Just before Marcial turned seven, the Cristero movement came to his town. It was during these years of instability and social turmoil, as the Maciel family moved to Jamay (in the state of Jalisco) and later to Zamora (in Michoacán), that Maciel received his first communion in a clandestine ceremony. It was also during these years that his soul was profoundly marked by the heroic testimony of many Christians who suffered under religious persecution.

When Marcial was nine years old, the Mexican government and the Church made an agreement and the Cristeros disbanded. In Cotija once again, Marcial resumed his education at the private school of Mrs. María Neri and continued learning from his mother’s example.

As a teenager, Marcial used to climb a small hill just outside the town and contemplate the scene before him: the cemetery, the houses, the people of his town… It was during one of those times of quiet solitude that it occurred to him that at the end of our lives, “all that remains is what we have done for God and for our brothers and sisters” (Words in Paul VI Hall of the Vatican, January 4, 1991). At the same time, his charity toward the poor grew and became a constant factor, to the point that service and charity were what characterized him in the eyes of others.

At the age of fifteen, he entered a seminary run by his uncle, Saint Rafael Guizar y Valencia, bishop of Veracruz. The atmosphere at that time was still predominantly hostile to the Church, so the seminary was clandestine, hidden away in Mexico City. In 1936, on the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, while praying in front of the tabernacle, Marcial experienced an interior impulse that he interpreted as a call from God to gather a group of priests who would go throughout the world tirelessly preaching the love of Christ. This idea took shape years later in the foundation of the religious congregation of the Legionaries of Christ, and later on, the Regnum Christi Movement.

From September of 1938 to June of 1940, Marcial studied under the sponsorship of the diocese of Chihuahua and then of Cuernavaca, in the interdiocesan seminary that the Mexican bishops had established the year before in Montezuma (New Mexico, United States). After sharing his plans for a new foundation with his companions, he was expelled from the center. His companions long remembered him as a man of prayer.

He continued studying theology under the bishop of Cuernavaca, Bishop Francisco González Arias, who was a distant uncle of his. At the same time, he began recruiting boys to be in his new order; some of them would be the first cofounders. On January 3, 1941, with the bishop’s blessing, he established a community in the style of a minor seminary with thirteen teenagers and a young 20-year-old founder. They started out in some borrowed rooms of a house in Mexico City. From May of that year onward, the school had its own house in Tlalpan (in Mexico City).

In the following years, Marcial studied, gathered alms for the boys, attended to the formation of the students, and looked for new vocations. On November 26, 1944, the founder of the Legion of Christ was ordained a priest in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, surrounded by his family members, some benefactors, and a growing group of young men who would decisively dedicate their lives to the foundation of the new order. After visiting Spain and Rome in May and June of that year, Father Maciel brought some of his seminarians to Comillas (in Cantabria, Spain) in September. The seminarians were to study at the prestigious pontifical university of Comillas. Although adversities were not lacking, on June 13, 1948, the bishop of Cuernavaca, Bishop Alfonso Espino y Silva, canonically established the religious congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and of Our Lady of Sorrows, which would later be called the Legionaries of Christ. At that time, there were about fifty members of the institute, including the minor seminarians.

In the midst of a century of ideologies, secularism, and pragmatism, Marcial Maciel preached that human happiness is found in personal friendship with Christ. To help this world that “is waning and dying for lack of Christ” (letter of Marcial Maciel, July 2, 1946), he intended to gather a group of men and women who would know, live, and preach the love of Christ, and commit to giving the best of themselves in the effort to share him effectively with their fellow man.

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