This episode contains subscriptions of sexual abuse of miners that might be distressing for some listeners.

Please take care as you listen.

There were nights when the screaming wouldn't stop.

Books hit the wall, a chair scraping violently across the floor.

Then another crash, louder, this time like something wooden snapping in half.

From the hallway, a few young seminarians stood frozen, eyes wide listening.

Inside.

Maciel was screaming, not words exactly, sounds guttural, furious, as if something was teering through him.

He shoudered to the heavens, cursed the devil, pleaded for mercy, and then silence.

When the door finally creaked open.

The next morning, Masille stepped out, his eyes sunken, His face was pale and soaked with sweat.

His voice was hoarse.

When he spoke, he would tell them he'd been battling the devil, that demons had come for him in the night, and that only his prayers, his suffering, had kept them at bay, and they believed him.

To those inside the Legion, the screaming was a sign of holiness, a man so close to God, the devil floot to take him, but there was another explanation, one far less divine.

Masielle was an fighting spirits.

He was in withdrawal.

He was addicted to the Latina, a powerful operiod used for severe pain, and when he couldn't get it, the suffering was real, but it wasn't holy, it was chemical.

He didn't hide it.

He wrapped it in the language of sacrifice, told his followers it was pain for a purpose, that each injection was a test from God.

One seminarian later recalled administering up to forty injections in.

A single day.

Mosiel even sent seminarians to get him the drug.

Boys, barely teenagers, were sent to nearby pharmacists, walking up to counters with shaky prescriptions and forged names, always asking for the same drug, always to the same address.

At first the pharmacists were confused, then suspicious.

Then in nineteen sixty two, a pharm assistant San Sebastian, Spain, made a report to the authorities.

The pattern was impossible to ignore.

That's how they found him.

When the police picked him up, Masiele blamed his own seminarians, said they had misunderstood, that they'd made mistakes, that he wasn't responsible for anyone else's addiction.

By the next day, the phone calls had started, quiet, powerful, coming from inside the church.

Someone offered a bribe seventy thousand dudos, a small fortune at the time, worth thousands of dollars today, And just like that, the paperwork vanished, the churches disappeared, and Masielle walked free.

Looking back, it's astonishing how many times Marcielle slipped through.

Every time his dirty secrets threatened to become public, he escaped.

And the story of Marseille's pain, it's the key to this whole thing.

It's a pain that would spread from Masiell to his many victims across the years.

Decades later, in nineteen ninety seven, Jason Barry's article pulled Mazille's hidden life into the light.

For the first time, the world could read the accusations, the years of abuse, the cover ups.

It should have been the moment everything shattered, but it wasn't.

Masille's empires stayed intact, his power held, the Vaticans stayed silent.

Most people would have given up after the article, speaking out and seeing nothing change, but one man didn't.

One of Marseille's victims.

He had spoken to Jason Barry for the article the Man behind the Box that armed Jason with names, documents and testimonies.

His name is Josel Barba.

He was once a proud member of the Legion.

Then he became a victim of Mosiel.

Josel once believed he would dedicate his life to God.

He ended up spending his life fighting for justice.

This episode is about Cosel, the pain he refused to bury and the fight he never let go off.

My name is Elena Sadah and this is secret Scandal, the Many Secrets of Marcelle Moseiel.

Episode four, The Pains.

Josef Barba was a child when he entered the Legion of Christ.

He came from a small town in Halisco, Mexico, not far from where Marsell was born.

His family was devout, disciplined, and proud of it, and jose was everything a good Catholic boy should be, bright, obedient, and eager to serve.

His mother was one of Marseille's first followers, and to her, the best way to support the mission was by giving her son to it.

So Roosel was sent to Quinta Patelli when he was eleven years old.

Quinta Patelli was a kind of a religious training ground, a boarding school for the first generations of legionary recruits.

The grounds had a private lake, a soccer field, a bowling stables.

It felt like stepping into a dream.

For Jose those early days were magical.

He remembers it still, at eighty eight years old.

He remembers everything behind his thick glasses, his sharp blue eyes don't miss a detail.

He's a man of quiet elegance, always wrapped in long coat, cashimeir's scarf, a tweet cap and a can.

When he talks about those childhood years at Quinta Pacelli, there's a fondness in his voice.

We certainly had norms and rules, but within this we had a freedom of selection, of friendship.

We had happiness we could enjoy, and there was no secrecy.

But when the summer of nineteen fifties came, everything changed.

At twelve years old, who has stood at the port of Veracruz a small suitcase in hand, the sea went tugging at his clothes.

He's been chosen to continue his studies across the ocean in Spain, far from his family and from the only country.

He'd ever known.

The ship waiting before him was called El Marquez de Comedias, a massive transatlantic liner bound for another.

Life, from Vera Cruz to Havana, from Havana to New York City, and then from New York to Spain in La Coruna, and then from La Coruna to Santander, a journey.

Across the ocean, from childhood to something else entirely in Spain, who said would continue his studies and start his road towards priesthood.

It was the highest honor a Catholic mother could dream of, and Jose wanted to make her so proud.

That's what it meant so much to him.

When Masielle took a special interest in him, it felt like a kind of quiet approval, a sign he was on the right path.

Masiell spent long hours mentoring Jose, talking about God, about faith, but also asking strange questions, uncomfortable questions, especially for someone who was.

Going through peverty.

Jose was at that awkward age when the body starts to change and nothing makes sense.

That summer, he had asked me, in a very strange way, if I knew the way children were born and in the same supposed to be spiritually direction, He asked me whether I like women or men, and I felt very offended, and I said, of course I like women.

Of course I like women.

Mazielle disguised these conversations as spiritual guidance.

One minute he was quoting the Bible, the next asking about sex.

He said they were lessons, but they felt more like traps.

So he started talking about the material birds and bees and flowers and so on, and the pollen.

Jose had only a faint idea of how children were born.

Masielle's weird talk about the birds and the bees was the closest thing he'd ever get the sex education inside the legion.

And the problem wasn't just what Mazille said, It was what happened when Josse started to ask real questions.

And then I said, I was very surprised, and so why if this is so beautiful and gives life, why when something happens in another way?

It's a scene.

Masille's face hardened, house I could feel he had done something terribly wrong, and he was.

So mad, and he's creamed at me and said, how do you dare to discuss God?

What God wants for someone seeing a spiritual leader.

Masielle's behavior was highly erratic.

He was moody and volatile.

There were days when everything was calm and days when the slightest comment set him off.

Back then, jose I didn't know what to make of Mozille's sudden mood swings.

But looking back now, it's kind of obvious.

This wasn't just a bad temper.

He was in withdrawal.

People with addictions often behaved this way.

Their moods go up and down depending on when they got their last fix, and that's exactly what this was.

Mazille wasn't just sick.

He was addicted to a powerful opiate called do lentina, a drug in the same family as morphine, and he didn't even try to hide it.

In fact, he often sent young legionaries to get it for him.

He'd asked them to go to the pharmacy in his name and request lentina.

Some of them didn't even know what it was, just that mister Padden needed it badly, and the older Maciele got, the more visible the problem became.

Many pharmacists already had him flagged, like the one instance of Astienne where he got arrested.

They would refuse him off the bat but Mozille didn't let that stop him.

He was bold and shameless.

He wrapped his pain in religious language, making it sound like it was this sacred burden, that his suffering was holy.

Jose remembers the first time he saw Masile's needle marks on his arm.

He raised his left, his left the part of his jacket, and he showed us, and he said, you see, my children, this is what I have to do in order to continue the work of the Lord.

Josef felt the mix of awe and sorrow watching Masile suffer like that.

He almost wished he could carry the pain for him.

And I remember very clearly that I asked God to pass me his infirmity, because he was needed and I was not needed.

To jose those little marks weren't just a sign of illness.

They were proof of a man willing to endure anything for his mission.

The kind of suffering Sains were made of.

Jose was so impressed by Massile's sacrifice he told his mother during her next visit.

I told her with great admiration, because for me, that was a sign of sanctity.

But my mother was very diffident and looked at me in a strange way that I didn't know how to interpret, and I said, and who does he inject on himself?

That made me feel that something was not right.

Something was definitely not right.

I remember when I first began to notice the mood swings and the sudden disappearances.

Massiel I would say he wasn't feeling well, that he was in pain from the sudden cramps in his abdomen.

He said it was something he'd carried for years.

By late afternoon, he would start to sweat, grow tense and irritable.

Then he would retreat to his room to pray.

The pain was part of the myth of who Nosterpado was.

What no one could have imagined, how he used that pain over and over again as the perfect excuse to hide something darker, and how in the name of that pain he would destroy dozens of lives, including Kossays will be right back.

Five years had passed since Josef first boarded that ship to Spain.

He was now seventeen, a teenager cut in that confusing in between his body changing, his thoughts, shifting, feeling shame without knowing why.

And in the legion there was nowhere to put that confusion.

You couldn't ask questions because everything was considered impure, even the things you didn't understand.

He was far from home, surrounded by stone walls and Latin prayers.

He had no one to talk to.

But inside him something was steering, a growing tension between what he was told to believe and what his body was starting to tell him.

Then one day, on a visit to Rome, it all exploded.

I remember by one time in a square in Rome whore I by accident touch a woman in the front.

It happened in a narrow Roman square, just a few blocks from the heart of Vatican City.

The afternoon sun spilled over the crowd of tourists, pilgrims, and locals.

Jose was wearing his cassock, standing in line with other seminarians, and then it happened.

A woman pushed past, trying to squeeze through the crowd.

His arm brushed against his chest.

Just for a split second, his breath stopped.

It meant nothing, but it felt like a sin.

I had to go to confess because I had touched a woman.

Even accidental contact required confession.

That night, the priest asked him, did.

You feel pleasure?

I said, not, all the opposite.

Josef felt a shame.

For weeks, he couldn't stop thinking about it.

In the Legion there were no mentors, they were only confessors, So he tried to bury his feelings, threw himself back into his studies, tried to act like nothing had happened.

But something had changed, and not just inside him.

The world around him started to feel off, the routines, the glances, even Moziel.

Then, out of nowhere, Masilee summoned him for a short field trip that in itself wasn't unusual.

Mazilee often traveled with a small entourage of young Legionnaires he trusted.

This time, Josel was among them.

Their destination a quiet town in southwestern France, near the Spanish border.

The group stayed in a modest hotel, but for the boys it was a great honor.

Mosile had personal he chose them.

They were excited, laughing in the lobby, whispering about who got to sit closest to him at lunch.

And then something really strange happened.

Myself was assigning rooms to each of the boys, calling out names, giving them keys.

But then when it came to his cistern, he.

Was distributing the rooms but I was surprised that he did not assign me a room, and he was taking me to the final room that was for him.

And then I felt bad and returned back.

And I entered one of the rooms where I had seen some of my companions assigned, and I asked them to allow me to pull a mattress to the floor, and I slept on the floor.

Hoself felt on his for the rest of the trip.

I got feeling that something wasn't quite right, but he brushed it off, told himself not to overthink it.

Maybe he was imagining things, so he kept his head down, tried to stay helpful, obedient, invisible.

Then a few months later, back in Rome, Mazille summoned him again, this time to the infirmary.

As I walked into the room, it was dim, the blinds half drawn.

The air smelt like aloane mixed with something medicinal.

In the corner, another young legendary stood by the window.

His back was turned, holding his post like a silent sentinel guarding off intruders.

Before we continue, I want to take a moment to pause.

What he says about to describe is an account of sexual abuse.

The details are painful, and maybe difficult to hear.

Masille was lying on the bed, half of his body in the shadows.

He spoke in a low voice, asking Joseid to sit beside him.

He said, sat, sit down on the edge of the bed, and I put a pillow between him and me.

And he said, why do you do that?

Approached me.

I said, no, I have been sweating.

I was working near the near the swimming pool and said, oh, no, no.

He took them the pillow away, and he said, come near, and then he said he had his pain in his genital area.

The boy thought Massilee's pain was abdomino, that's the version he had heard over and over.

But now Masille was pointing much lower, and Josef felt a kind of fear he didn't yet have words for.

And he asked me if he if I would allow give him some massage.

He froze.

Every instinct told him to get up and leave the room.

But how could he.

This was Massiele, his founder, the most sacred man he had ever known.

He thought about his spain, his sacrifice, his needle marks.

How would he know better than mister Patter.

He told himself this was part of the mission, that maybe this was wholly too, but he couldn't move, so he just stood still.

You would feel that I'm crazy, But the other time, I was so convinced of his entity.

When Mazille saw that Hossel was hesitating, he tried another strategy.

He said, specifically, I had permission from Bias the twelve for some nuns to give me massage in my inner parts, meaning his pen is.

On so own.

Mazille said he had permission from the Pope himself, that the massages were merely a medical treatment, And just like that, everything who said thought he knew began to crumble.

His head was spinning.

If the Pope had allowed it, then maybe it wasn't the sin.

Maybe it was necessary, a way to help the pain.

The problem was when Josel was confused.

Massiel was a man he turned to the one who always had all the answers, But now when he needed guidance the most, there was no one left to ask, because the only person he trusted was the one violating him.

When he asked me to give him massage around his pinis, I was tense, extremely tense.

My hand was open in a sign as refusing that.

He got mad.

He took my hand, and he took it out with impatience, and he said, you do not know how to do it.

That's when Masielle grew impatient and pushed her Say's hand away.

He started unbottom my pants and he started to saying, I want to explain where I feel the pain.

I want to.

Explain exactly to you.

And I said, oh no, please, I already understood.

Please don't I understood, and I turned my body on myself and I insisted until he took my pennies and he started mas serving in a hideous way.

I had never felt that.

For the sake of clarity, who says talking about masturbation or what seventeen year old has said thought was masturbation.

It wasn't until years later that he would be able to name what it actually was sexual abuse.

I have never touched myself, much less mast served and he as a crazy man, as a madman.

I feel under the influence.

He was not doing it as if you really wanted to give me pleasure, as if he were mad.

I only remember that I cried, I stood up, I took the way out while he cried, return stay here.

I didn't pay obedience, and I went to the nearest bedroom outside the corridor.

W second up and changed.

Then he went back to the room where Massier was.

He was standing up with the white short of rope, his clergyman was on.

He was putting some cologne water on his hands.

Massile stood there composed, come adjusting his sleeves.

Then he stepped outside by the poll to bless the outdoor lunch.

The rest of the boar were gathering in the courtyard, laughing beneath the bluest sky, like it was just another Thursday, like none of it had happened.

Who says, kipt lunch that day.

I was crying and crying alone in my bedroom.

I didn't know what to do.

I did not know what to do.

Who said?

Didn't tell anyone, not that day, not for years.

He made himself believe that maybe somehow he had done the right thing, that in some strange way, he had just helped myself out with his pain.

But he knew something was wrong.

For a while, he felt as if his body smelled weird, no matter how often he based.

Later, Josse would write that compared to what other victims endured, he had been, in his own words, relatively fortunate.

He experienced three episodes of sexual violence.

The second came just a week after the first, when Masill called him back and forced the kiss, shoving his tongue into Hoss's mouth.

The third when he was forced to witness another boy touching Masile on an Italian beach.

Nine years later, in nineteen sixty four, he couldn't bear it anymore.

He no longer.

Wanted to be a legendary priest, so he left.

He moved to the United States and threw himself into academia.

For the next two decades, Who Says studied literature and language.

He earned a master's degree and a doctorate in Romance languages, and then another PhD from Harvard in Latin American literature.

The truth he carried, the memory of what Marcile did to him, remained unspoken for forty years.

I often wonder why it took that long, why someone like who says, so eloquent, so brave, waited for decades to speak.

But then I remember what victims of abuse go through.

The fear, the guilt, the trauma.

Jose had been silenced not just by Massiel, but by the machine that protected him.

He knew how powerful Massiele was and probably thought no one would ever believe him until nineteen ninety four.

That year, Pop John Paul the second wrote a letter published in major newspapers across Mexico, publicly praising.

The founder I need.

The pope called Masseille efficacious guide for the youth.

For Jose, those words felt like a slap in the face.

So he decided to speak, but finding someone who listened was almost impossible.

For two years, he knocked on doors, He wrote to journalists, CULTIVI stations, reached out to newspapers in Mexico, but no one wanted to tell his story.

No one wanted to go against the legion.

They were too powerful, too close to politicians and entrepreneurs to reach, too dear to the Vatican.

When journalists told him of the record, I believe you, but I can't afford to lose my job.

Again and again, the answer was silence, until one day someone picked up the phone.

More than that after the break.

It was nineteen ninety six, Mexico City.

Inside his quiet office at ITAM, one of the country's most prestigious universities, Jose was making a phone call to someone he'd never met.

He had heard a lot about an American journalist who had written a book about abuse in the Catholic Church.

Could this be the person who would finally listen?

Would he dare investigate someone as protected as Massil.

Jose needed someone like that, so he made the call, and after some convincing, Jason said yes.

From that first conversation till the date of publication in the Harford Current, it took six months.

Josse worked all day as the professor, then stayed up into the early hours for constructing every detail of those early years.

It drained him physically unemotionally.

He says it was one of the most exhausting periods of his life, even now at eighty five, whose remembers it all?

He gave Jason names, documents, testimonies, and the article finally came out.

Husse was ready ready to face the press, the Vatican, even Masill himself if needed be.

What he wasn't prepared for was silence.

Masiell denied everything, said it was all a conspiracy, that his accusers were mentally unstable and bitter, and the article just fizzled into nothing.

That hit him harder than he expected.

He kept teaching.

Students passed through his classroom year after year, unaware that their kind, seft spoken professor had once believed he would dedicate his life to God and had instead been crushed trying to expose a monster.

But the pain was still there, waiting to erupt, and one day it did when his heart gave out.

Literally in October of nineteen ninety seven, eight months after Jason's article was published, jose underwent open heart surgery.

He didn't know if he'd make it back, but he did, and when he opened his eyes, something had shifted.

And when I came back on myself after the operation or one thing, I was certain that I did not care of alife.

I did not care.

But when I was recovering, I was in my apartment and I found out that Mosiele had been appointed one of the members of the group in that in America to work about the family, the Catholic family.

I was very offended.

I said, I am in my apartment recovering my health after what I have suffered, and I did suffer a lot.

Pop Jumpaul the Second had named Masill one of the only twenty delegates to the Senate of the Americas.

The Vaticans version of the G twenty Summit and Masielle didn't just get a seat at the table.

He was something like the guest of honor, because I wasn't willing to take it anymore.

And then I decided to write his letter to the Pope.

He wasn't going to wait around hoping the truth would clear the Vatican's red tape on its own.

This time, he was going straight to the top, no excuses, no middleman, no lost messages.

What he didn't know was that someone else was already there inside the church, trying to do the same thing.

That's next on Secret Scandal, Sacred Scandal.

The Many Secrets of Marcelle Marseille is a production of AHA Podcast in partnership with Iheartmichael Doura podcast Network, and is hosted by me Elena Sadah, written by Menissa Hendrix and Alvado Sez Petes, produced by Alvados Pees and Robert Ta Garza.

Is search and reporting by Robert Agarza, edited by Jasmine Rometo with the help of Carmen graterol In, fact checking by Annabella Toward The vocal coach for me Elene Sada is Ina Tabia.

Executive producers at a Her Podcast are Carmen graterol Isaac Lee, and j H.

Carr.

Mixing and sound designed by Patrick and Jones.

Original music by Darko and I Am based on Patrick Hart's original composition.

Executive producers that I heard are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana.

Alexis Cardosa also serves as producer.

Sircar Scandal was created by Melanie Bartley and Paula Varos