Render Unto Rome (31 page)

Still in ecclesiastical limbo, Father Maciel in 1958 completed a seminary in Salamanca, Spain, with financial help from Josefita Pérez Jiménez, the daughter of a former Venezuelan dictator.
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Despite Valeri’s suspension order, Maciel suffered no loss of standing in his travels. His drug use would ebb and roll for decades. In 1958 Maciel got his break when Pope Pius XII died. Cardinal Micara, now the vicar of Rome, signed an order reinstating Maciel—something for which, in the interregnum between popes, Micara had no authority. Canon law puts the decision making of most Vatican officials on hold until a new pope is elected. What was Cardinal Valeri to do? Expend his version of political capital with the new pope, John XXIII, by protesting the reinstatement of a druggie priest who had lines to enough cash to erect a basilica? Maciel regained power on an illicit order from a cardinal he had given $10,000 to twelve years before. As Fuentes wrote of the dictator, “The ideology of progress overrode all objections.”
Micara had blessed the basilica’s cornerstone. Maciel had the money to finish it.

Like the captive American soldiers brainwashed by Communists in
The Manchurian Candidate
, a cold war film, the Legionaries bore the psychological scars of Maciel’s tyranny for decades to come. Unlike the movie characters, dozens of ex-Legionaries never forgot what Maciel did to them—nor his confiding that he had permission from Pius XII for his sexual relief. The idea of clergy abuse survivors speaking out lay many years in the future.

In 1972 Maciel sent Father Juan Vaca to Connecticut to guide the Legion’s American operations. In 1976 thirty-nine-year-old Vaca left the Legion and joined the clergy of the Rockville Centre, Long Island, diocese. Vaca wrote Maciel a searing twelve-page letter listing twenty other victims. He also gave the letter to his bishop, John R. McGann.
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Bishop McGann questioned a second ex-Legionary priest in his diocese, Felix Alarcón, who admitted that Maciel abused him, too. McGann sent their statements to the Vatican. Nothing happened. Vaca petitioned the Vatican to take action in 1978, again to no avail. In 1989, having left the priesthood, Vaca sent his original document with an impassioned letter to John Paul II, via Vatican channels. He asked for official dispensation of his vows, arguing that his ordination was invalid; he wanted a church blessing for his civil marriage. In 1993 he got the dispensation but nothing on the allegations.

Vaca’s classmates took years to reconnect and admit among themselves what Maciel had done. A languages professor named Arturo Jurado, after reading
Lead Us Not into Temptation
, contacted me in 1993 and put me in touch with José Barba. When the
Hartford Courant
reporter Gerald Renner called to see if I knew much about the secretive religious order in Connecticut, I had sworn statements from eight men. Renner’s call led to a joint assignment.

Our lengthy report on Maciel’s abuse of Legion youths ran in the
Courant
of February 23, 1997. Refusing to be interviewed, Maciel denied the accusations through a Washington, D.C., law firm, which sent documents by Regnum Christi members accusing Vaca and the others of a conspiracy against Maciel. The conspiracy charge lacked the salient fact of a motive. The
Courant
published Maciel’s letter reasserting his innocence, praying
for his accusers. A website
LegionaryFacts.org
, and the Legion’s newspaper, the
National Catholic Register
, defended Maciel, counterattacking the accusers (and journalists). The Vatican refused to answer our calls, not even a “no comment.” But the silence meant no assertion of Maciel’s innocence. Most of the mainstream media ignored the story until the 2002 abuse crisis; however, in Mexico City, the daily
La Jornada
did a follow-up series and a cable station, Channel 40, ran a documentary interviewing Barba, Vaca, and others. An advertisers’ boycott nearly killed the station.

Ironically, Father Kunze’s computer in the Congregation for the Clergy gave him the first taste of freedom: in 1999 he followed a Google link to the forbidden article and was astounded to read the allegations of men, by name, including “a priest, guidance counselor, professor, engineer and lawyer.”

Some of the men, now in their 50s and 60s, wept during the interviews. All said the events still haunt them.

They said they were coming forward now because Pope John Paul II did not respond to letters from two priests sent through church channels in 1978 and 1989 seeking an investigation, and then praised Maciel in 1994 as “an efficacious guide to youth.”

“The pope has reprimanded Germans for lack of courage during the Nazi era. We are in a similar situation. For years we were silent. Then we tried to reach authorities in the church. This is a statement of conscience,” said Jose de J. Barba Martin, one of the men …

Each one said Maciel was addicted to painkilling drugs despite his being cleared of that accusation in the Vatican investigation.
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The flashback hit Kunze like a gust of freezing wind: in a hotel room near the Legion center in Les Avants, Switzerland, in 1992, Kunze stares at Nuestro Padre’s open suitcase, lined with tiny, white-capped orange plastic bottles filled with powder, no prescription labels. Kunze thinks,
I know Father Maciel’s sick, but why does he need all these drugs?
His superior, Father Fergus O’Carroll, says Maciel has doctors’ permission to mix his own drugs.

Kunze read on. “Maciel would summon a boy to his room at night and be in his bed, writhing in apparent pain, and ask the boy to rub his
stomach.” And the memory Kunze had tried to stuff welled up again: still in 1992, himself at the wheel of Father Maciel’s favored Mercedes, the priest in the backseat telling him to “pull over” just before they cross into Belgium. Nuestro Padre leans forward, his fingers reaching onto Chris’s right forearm, his hand stroking him. “Oh, how strong you are,” purrs Maciel. “The nurses help me, they give me massages when I have pain.” The strapping young celibate, ever-sensitive to sexual stoicism, thinks,
He’s not only touching me, he’s talking about massages—is he really coming on to me?
Kunze’s resistant body language sent Maciel sinking softly into his seat. When Kunze returned to Germany, his Legionary brothers were full of wonder about his lucky drive alone with Nuestro Padre. Obedient to the private vows, he told them how good the trip had been, the weight of his mendacity so thick that some nights he cried in his room.
We are all sinners
, he told himself, even Father Maciel. He had stayed in the Legion despite Maciel’s advances:
Why did I do that?
His family, two years after the encounter in the car, had gone to Mexico City for his ordination ceremony. His sister, Lizzie, was a Regnum Christi celibate teaching at a girls’ finishing school in Switzerland while he, stricken with doubt, reeling from memories of Maciel he had failed to expunge, read how Juan Vaca “hand-delivered” a letter to Maciel “with a list of 20 victims.” Father Owen Kearns, to whom Kunze made his cathartic forty-five-minute confession in Cheshire, told the newspaper, “Vaca is seeking revenge because he was incompetent in his job and was being demoted.” Vaca disputed that claim but acknowledged that despondency over years of abuse had affected his ministry. (Vaca, in fact, resigned with a hand-delivered letter to Maciel in Mexico City on April 4, 1976.)

These are the conspirators Luis Garza warned us against
, Kunze realized,
but this sounds true!
Obedient to the private vows, he said nothing to his fellow Legionaries. A lonely sense of futility haunted his identity as a priest. As the days rolled down to Christmas, he watched seminarians in the basement prepare the gift baskets for Legion friends in the Curia. The spectacle of fine wines, liqueurs, and cured hams deepened Kunze’s sadness.
What am I doing here?
He had no idea other Legionaries felt guilt about the Legion’s materialism.

The Christmas gifts were divided into categories by declining levels of importance, a Legion priest told me in Rome in 2009. “Legionary brothers are sent in cars to deliver them to cardinals and other allies, always for a
purpose—to gain power for the Legion and Maciel,” he said. “A small gift, I understand; but a large gift is a bribe … Fine Spanish hams cost quite a lot—30 euros per kilo. You can spend a thousand dollars for a large one.”
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AN ELEGANT WAY OF GIVING A BRIBE

First Things
editor Father Richard John Neuhaus had come out swinging in a March 8, 1997, letter to the
Courant
, denouncing “the scurrilous charges that have been lodged against Father Maciel” and praising the Legionaries. The Vatican gave a more Olympian endorsement that fall: John Paul named Maciel one of twenty-one papal delegates to the Synod for America in Rome. The
National Catholic Reporter
called it “a distressing message … [that] the church does not really take sex abuse accusations seriously.”
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Maciel mingled with hierarchs and lay notables like Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who also lectured at Regina Apostolorum. Neuhaus, since his early years as a Lutheran pastor arrested at 1960s antiwar protests, had swung to the right, becoming a Catholic, a priest, and a Republican polemicist, forging ties with evangelical leaders like Chuck Colson and gaining support from conservative foundations.
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At the synod he sat by Maciel. “Most of the secretarial and logistical assistance here seems to be handled by the Legionaries,” wrote Neuhaus.
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“Events with their seminarians and priests are marked by a festive sense of delight, complete with ample wine and exuberant mariachi bands, reflecting a sheer joy in being invited to throw away their lives for Christ.”
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Throwing away their lives is how several Legion priests, unaware of Kunze’s gloom, had begun to feel about Maciel’s use of money. None of them knew that in October 1998 José Barba and Arturo Jurado filed a canonical case in Cardinal Ratzinger’s office, seeking Maciel’s expulsion for absolving “sins” of his victims in confession, an issue over which the CDF had a tribunal on which to rule. An official asked the men to keep silent. As they left, the Mexicans saw Ratzinger and knelt in respect, kissing his ecclesial ring.
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Accusations against the head of an international religious order were a rarity for the Vatican justice system. Each congregation has its
competenza
, or responsibility. Most congregations fielding requests from bishops or superiors to punish sex abusers did not have tribunals, legal arenas to pass
judgment. The 1997 accusations should have put Maciel’s fate in the CDF, which has its own tribunal, apart from the major canonical courts at the Signatura, the Rota, and the Apostolic Penitentiary. Canon law is administrative and does not provide open trials or jury deliberations. Tribunal cases dragged on for years. The real issue was whether
anyone in the Vatican
wanted to take action against a high priest. The few cases to cross Kunze’s desk were passed to Castrillón.

The Maciel accusations also confronted the
competenza
of Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo, the Spanish prefect of the congregation overseeing religious orders. His office, one floor above that of Clergy, should have launched an inquiry: Maciel was superior general of an order. Martínez Somalo had presided at a 1985 ordination of Legionaries at Rome’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica.

Because Maciel was highly favored by the Holy Father, the accusations concerned Sodano as papal chief of staff. John Paul’s 1994 praise of Maciel as “an efficacious guide to youth” now called his judgment into question.

Maciel had used large sums of money to insulate himself from justice.

In 1995, according to former Legion insiders, Maciel sent $1 million to John Paul, via Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, when the pope traveled to Poland. As papal secretary, the Polish-born Dziwisz (pronounced Gee-Vish) was the man closest to John Paul for decades. Handling money was part of his job. In the Vatican’s 1980s alliance with Solidarity, Dziwisz persuaded Polish authorities to overlook customs duties on trucks with imported goods, many of which carried up to $2,000 cash, in small bills, to help the resistance.
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Dziwisz slept down the hall from John Paul in the papal living quarters.

Maciel had previously arranged for Flora Barragán to attend a private Mass said by John Paul II. The chapel in the Apostolic Palace seats forty people in a milieu graced by Michelangelo’s frescoes
The Conversion of Saul
and
The Crucifixion of St. Peter
.
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Mass there was a rare privilege for the visiting dignitary, like British prime minister Tony Blair and his family. “Mass would start at 7 a.m., and there was always someone in attendance: laypeople, or priests, or groups of bishops,” Dziwisz wrote.

They often found the pope kneeling in prayer with his eyes closed, in a state of total abandonment, almost of ecstasy, completely
unaware of who was entering the chapel … For the laypeople, it was a great spiritual experience. The Holy Father attached extreme importance to the presence of the lay faithful.
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“I accompanied a wealthy family from Mexico for a private Mass and at the end, the family gave Dziwisz $50,000,” explains Father A, who left the Legion and spoke on background. The $50,000 payment was in 1997, the year Maciel was publicly accused. “We arranged things like that,” the priest said of his role as go-between. Given the pope’s ascetic lifestyle and accounts of his charitable giving, such funds could have been routed to a deserving cause. Did Dziwisz salt away some for himself? His book says nothing about donations and does not mention the Legion. Father A brooded about the Legion’s pipeline to the pope: “This happened all the time. Dziwisz provided frequent appearances for Legion supporters, which was huge” in helping the order.
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“It was always cash. And in dollars. You’d need too many notes for lire. Even in Mexico they preferred using dollars over pesos.”