Render Unto Rome (28 page)

The Midas touch of Father Maciel opens into a saga of how one man financially seduced influential members of the Roman Curia, compromising their values as he cultivated powerful conservatives from Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire (and by some accounts the world’s richest man), to Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza and Ave Maria University in Florida. Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who praised Maciel’s “radiant holiness,” became President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the Holy See. Maciel cultivated a who’s who of Catholic conservatives to support the Legion or himself. The list includes former CIA director William Casey; Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of
First Things
and a tireless propagandist for Maciel; George Weigel, the conservative activist and a biographer of John Paul II; William Bennett, the Reagan drug czar and subsequent CNN commentator; William Donohue of the Catholic League; Steve McEveety, the producer of Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
; former Florida governor Jeb Bush; and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who spoke at Legion gatherings, as did former CNN correspondent Delia Gallagher. The list runs on.

But it was John Paul II and Vatican officials who put the imprimatur on Maciel by willfully ignoring the signs of rot in a man the Legionaries called Nuestro Padre, “Our Father.” Maciel was the master salesman of resurgent orthodoxy, an ethos of wealth-as-virtue that triumphed over liberation theology’s idealism in the Vatican mind-set. This religious mercantilism crystallized on John Paul’s 1999 trip to Mexico with Vatican-franchised street sales of papal trinkets and potato chip bags sporting the papal coat of arms. The scholar Elio Masferrer Kan has criticized this theology of prosperity,
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a gilded cousin to the prosperity gospel of commercially minded Pentecostal sects. Maciel
embodied
the theology of prosperity. The greatest fund-raiser of the modern church, Maciel used religion to make money, buying protection at the Vatican lest his secret life be exposed. For most of his life, it worked.

MILWAUKEE TO ROME

Chris Kunze witnessed the crossroads of faith and money on a 1990 trip to the Netherlands. He accompanied Father Maciel to Eindhoven and
the home of Piet Derksen, a Catholic philanthropist. Maciel, who was thoroughly Mexican despite his French surname, spoke only Spanish. The mannered Latin persona held a piercing gaze behind his glasses. Maciel, seventy and nearly bald, took daily walks to keep trim despite a history of illness. He spoke in firm cadences, pausing for Kunze to translate into English for their Dutch host, stressing that the Legion was building the first university in Rome in generations. Kunze was supremely aware of his role in the presentation: a future priest in Maciel’s movement of neo-orthodoxy. Seminarians accompanied Legion priests to call on donors. “Derksen gave $1.5 million,” says Kunze, “which helped pay our debts in Germany and helped build Regina Apostolorum”—the university in Rome.

Born in 1961, Christopher Kunze grew up in Milwaukee with a younger brother and twin sisters. His mother was a hospital administrator, his father a real estate agent who had fled Communist East Germany at fourteen. Kunze spent a year in the high school seminary, but it closed for lack of numbers. A fullback on his football team, he went on to Marquette University, majoring in philosophy. As a sophomore, he moved into Milwaukee’s major seminary, continuing classes at Marquette. Most of the seminarians were gay. After two faculty priests made sexual advances on him Kunze left in disgust. A Phi Beta Kappa, he graduated from Marquette in 1984, yearning to become a priest. A pastor suggested the Legion of Christ. Drawn to a “spiritual warrior mystique about the priesthood,” Kunze entered the Legion novitiate on an elegant estate in Cheshire, Connecticut.

In addition to Latin, Greek, and Spanish, he learned the history of Father Maciel’s odyssey from war-torn Mexico, how he gained support in Rome and built an educational network that spread to other countries. America had two dozen Legion prep schools and two seminaries.
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Maciel’s photograph hung in Legion schools, where students absorbed a mantra:
Nuestro Padre is a living saint
.

Kunze had never encountered such demanding discipline. Every Legionary took private vows, unique to the order, laying a hand on the Bible, swearing to never speak ill of Nuestro Padre nor any Legion superior, and to report any member who might be critical to the superiors. Speaking well of others was a virtue. The private vows rewarded spying as an act of faith. Sacrificing one’s own ambition in love for Christ and not criticizing others were hallmarks of a good Legionary. They had three hours of daily
prayer and long periods of monastic silence. Superiors screened the letters they wrote home once a month and read their incoming mail. The men saw their families once a year. Cutting away from the family signaled one’s closeness to Christ.

That first year in Cheshire, Kunze made a forty-five-minute “general confession” to Father Owen Kearns, an Irishman. To prepare, Kunze reviewed “pages and pages I had written, recounting all the sins of my life, sins I had already confessed. It was embarrassing, and a little frightening, too.”

Out of the fear came a fierce cleansing, a purity in paring himself down, melding his will with an elite corps of men chosen by God to reevange-lize the Catholic Church. They embraced Maciel’s vision of saving the church from post–Vatican II decay as in liberation theology. Kunze and other young Legionaries wrote letters to Nuestro Padre, detailing their sins and shortcomings, hopes and aspirations. Forging a new life, Kunze felt a powerful surge of righteousness.

They spent hours discussing the constitution of the Legion of Christ.
¹³
Of the many bylaws, the seminarians memorized important ones that dealt with life in the Congregation, as the religious order was called:

268. 1 Abhor slander as the worst of all evils and the greatest enemy of the union and charity among ourselves.

2. If someone, through gossip or any other means, seeks internal division among ourselves, he shall be removed immediately from the center where he is to be found and stripped of all responsibilities …

3. Superiors shall learn to amputate with a firm and steady hand any member infected with the mortal cancer of slander and intrigue, if they do not want to make themselves responsible for the ruin of the Congregation.

They studied Nuestro Padre’s letters written over many years, particularly his ruminations for the affiliate group, of predominantly laypeople, called Regnum Christi, Kingdom of Christ. Regnum Christi began in the 1970s. This passage bears a “Madrid, 1944” dateline, but was written a generation later:
¹⁴

Worst of all is the terrible threat of Communism and the Protestant sects which try to tear away from [the church’s] bosom all the children she has made with her blood and whom she sustains through abundant and prolonged sacrifices …

[W]hen I meet up with the strength of youth withered and torn apart in the very springtime of life for lack of Christ, I cannot hold back the cries of my heart. I want to multiply myself so as to write, teach, and preach Christ. And from the very depths of my being, from the very spirit of my spirit, bursts forth this single resounding cry: My life for Christ! Re-Christianize mankind. This is our mission, this is our goal, this is the reason for our Movement.

Kunze lived in a community of sixty priests in the Center for Higher Studies at the Legion’s tree-lined campus on a plateau of western Rome. Kunze was among a dozen younger priests, all forbidden to speak to older clerics. The 320 seminarians, about evenly divided between students of philosophy and theology, were also forbidden to speak across lines of academic formation. Superiors screened their e-mails and approved website viewing. Across the lawn Kunze watched the construction of Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, which Piet Derksen’s $1.5 million was helping to build.
¹⁵
Weekday mornings Kunze sat in a Peugeot with two other Legion priests who worked in the Curia as they took turns driving down Via Aurelia, turning onto Via della Conciliazione, the grand boulevard cleared by Mussolini that ran from the Tiber River to St. Peter’s Square. The Congregation for the Clergy was in a pale yellow four-story building of neoclassical design. The elevator opened into a marble foyer a floor above a religious souvenir shop looking out on Bernini’s columns in the square.

When Kunze began work on December 8, 1997, he found an office still agog over the $119 million jury verdict in Dallas awarded to eight victims of the ex-priest Rudy Kos. The verdict that July had made international news. Castrillón fumed about money-grubbing lawyers. Clergy staffers wondered why American courts were so hostile to the church. The Dallas case, after six years of litigation, ended in 1998 with a negotiated settlement of $31 million for the plaintiffs.
¹⁶

Monsignor James Anthony McDaid ran the English-language desk. A short, stocky, Irish-born canonist who had also served as a priest in
the Denver archdiocese, Tony McDaid bristled about bishops giving pederasts a second chance. He had a law-and-order approach: defrock ’em. McDaid viewed St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Maryland—the foremost church-owned hospital that treated pedophiles—as a scandal in itself. The treatment included sex education films. McDaid brooded that they induced priests to masturbate.
¹⁷

Although he did not work in the Third Office, Kunze picked up on his colleagues’ concerns when certain bishops sold assets. “Weakland’s at it again,” Tony McDaid groused one day, referring to canonical protests of the Milwaukee archbishop’s parish closures (see
this page
). But Clergy backed Weakland, inevitably.

The workaday world at the Congregation for the Clergy exposed Chris Kunze to personalities who mirrored a greater diversity than he found in the Legion. The secretary and second in command, Archbishop Csaba Ternyak, was Hungarian. He believed priests should be allowed to marry. In his aloofness from Kunze, Ternyak telegraphed that he was no fan of the Legion.

Kunze read reports from the German-speaking bishops, often a hundred pages or longer, covering all dimensions of a diocese from finances to baptisms, and distilled the information for Cardinal Castrillón. He summarized the notes he took on the phone or in conversation for the files. No document could ever be taken home. Kunze followed the furor in Austria since Vienna’s cardinal-archbishop, Hans Hermann Groër, retired in 1995 amid accusations that he had coerced sex with young men in a monastery years before. Behind the scenes, Sodano and Ratzinger clashed over how to deal with Groër, Sodano prevailing as he left without a word of condemnation from John Paul in a show of Vatican unity.
¹⁸
On a 1998 trip to Austria, John Paul avoided mention of Groër. A lay group, We Are Church, with 500,000 signatures, had arisen over the Groër scandal as a larger protest of Vatican control.
¹⁹
When German bishops arrived for
ad limina
visits, the every-fifth-year meeting with the pope, Kunze prepared dossiers for Castrillón and assisted as translator in the cardinal’s meetings.

In the internal politics over celibacy, Kunze sided with Castrillón, Tony McDaid, and others while a liberal camp supported the option for priests to marry. When Cardinal Castrillón was away, Archbishop Ternyak hosted a visiting nuncio from Hungary. Kunze says, “He told everyone how great they were doing with a married clergy in Hungary”—an
offshoot of the Communist resistance. “A group of us were looking at our feet, red in the face, while others smiled. It was a small show of power on Ternyak’s part.”

No one discussed the economic impact from the long tide of men leaving the priesthood, many of whom had raised funds and managed parish budgets. The exodus was like that of a college losing seasoned professors or a newsroom its veteran editors, forcing an operation to do more with less, sacrificing quality in the process.

Monsignor Mauro Piacenza, a native of Genoa, slender, bespectacled, a devotee of opera, handled much of the Italian writing for Castrillón. Words poured out of Piacenza, written or spoken. The topics that animated him—theology, saints, a desire to shift control of the Curia from the Secretariat of State (under Sodano) to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (under Ratzinger)—were a tad sublime. But Kunze, who admired Ratzinger, shared Piacenza’s view of the CDF, the office where theologians’ works were judged for doctrinal purity, as a preferable high point of power in the Curia.

Father Maciel was quite close to Cardinal Sodano, but the Legion’s more important champion was Pope John Paul II himself.

In January 1979, on his first trip as pontiff, John Paul visited Mexico. Maciel sat on the plane with him, a reward for extensive advance work. Thanks to a Legionary priest who said private Masses for the First Lady, President José López Portillo decided to greet John Paul at the airport—a potent symbol in a heavily Catholic nation with a history of persecuted priests.
²⁰
Six months later, John Paul showed his appreciation with a visit to the Legionaries in Rome.
²¹
A video camera captured priceless moments of Maciel with the pope.

Troubled by the liberal drift of religious orders since Vatican II, John Paul was determined to restore the moorings of orthodoxy. As the priest shortage worsened, Maciel was competing with Opus Dei to recruit young men committed to papal teachings. The Legion had a financial engine in Regnum Christi, which had sixty thousand members, mostly laypeople, many of them upper middle class, some quite wealthy. One wing of Regnum Christi consisted of “consecrated women” who lived in communities, rather like nuns, staffing Legion prep schools. “One of the most powerful demonstrations of strength by the Legion,” the Spanish journalist Alfonso Torres Robles has written, “was its fiftieth anniversary celebration
on January 3, 1991, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, when John Paul II ordained 60 Legionaries into the priesthood, in the presence of 7000 Regnum Christi members from different countries, 15 cardinals, 52 bishops, and many millionaire benefactors from Mexico [and] Spain.”
²²