THREE clerical abuse victims in the United States said yesterday they are pursuing the Legion of Christ for reparations 25 years after the Roman Catholic order’s sexual abuse of initiates was exposed by a Connecticut newspaper.

The Hartford Courant’s February 23 1997 exposé blew the lid on a litany of abuses by the Legion’s Mexican founder, the Rev Marciel Maciel, facilitated by vows taken by the “legionaries” that forbade them to criticise their superiors and ordered them to report anyone else who did so.

But despite whistleblowers coming forward, pope at the time John Paul II refused to act against the order or its founder, with a canonical complaint languishing in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith until after his death in 2005.

Rome didn’t sanction Maciel till 2006, two years before his death — and the order only finally admitted its founder was a serial paedophile who had abused at least 60 boys in 2017, having long accused victims of organising a smear campaign.

Subsequently published documents show the Vatican had accumulated “credible reports” that Maciel was a con artist, drug addict, paedophile and religious fraud for years without acting on them, possibly as the legion was close to many leading Latin American political and business figures and brought in significant donations to the church’s coffers.

Jose Barba, one of the eight victims who came forward in 1997, says he and fellow survivors Arturo Jurado and Jose Antonio Perez Olvera want a formal retraction of the “negative institutional and personal judgements about the character and motivations of the people who made legitimate and necessary accusations,” and wants compensation to be decided by an independent arbitration panel, something the legion still refuses.