Render Unto Rome (32 page)

Maciel threw out the stops for a lavish reception in 1998 honoring Dziwisz’s elevation as a bishop, down to the festive Mexican music played, Mariachi-style, by a small Legionaries’ orchestra.

Father B, who also steered payments to Dziwisz for Legion patrons, says, “It’s not so much that you’re paying him for a person to go to Mass. You’re saying, ‘These people are fervent, it’s good for them to meet the pope.’ The expression is
opere de carità:
‘We’re making an offering for your
works of charity.
’ In fact, you don’t know where the money is going. It’s an elegant way of giving a bribe.”

On assignment for
National Catholic Reporter
, I tried to reach Dziwisz, now a cardinal in Kraców, for comment. Iowana Hoffman, a Polish journalist in New York, translated a letter with questions and faxed it to Dziwisz’s press secretary; he reported back that the cardinal “does not have time for an interview”—nor, indeed, for a statement defending John Paul’s use of the funds.
⁶⁶

Father B, who called the gifts an elegant bribe, explains why he left the Legion: “I woke up and asked: Am I giving my life to serve God, or one man who had his problems? It was not worth consecrating myself to Maciel.” Cardinals and bishops who said Mass for Legionaries received
payment of $2,500 and up, according to the importance of the event, the men said.

Do large sums of cash to a Vatican official constitute bribery? The money from Maciel went to heads and midlevel people at congregations through the 1990s. Such exchanges are not bribes in the view of canonist Nicholas Cafardi, the dean emeritus of Duquesne University Law School in Pittsburgh. Cafardi, who has worked as a legal consultant for many bishops, responded to a general question about large donations to priests or officials in the Vatican. Under canon 1302, a large financial gift to an official “would qualify as a pious cause,” says Cafardi. The Vatican has no oversight office; funds should be reported to the cardinal-vicar for Rome. An expensive gift, like a car, need not be reported. “That’s how I read the law,” Cafardi explains. “I know of no exceptions. Cardinals do have to report gifts for pious causes. If funds are given for the official’s personal charity, that is not a pious cause and need not be reported.”

“Maciel wanted to buy power,” says Father A, in explaining why he left the Legion. Morality was at issue. “It got to a breaking point for me [over] a culture of lying. The superiors know they’re lying and they know that you know. They lie about money, where it comes from, where it goes, how it’s given.”

With prescient calculation, Maciel had sunk money into the Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes by paying for the renovation of the residence of its prefect from 1976 to 1983, the late Cardinal Eduardo Francisco Pironio, according to Father A. Raised in Argentina, the youngest of twenty-two children born of Italian émigré parents, Cardinal Pironio enjoyed meals and socializing with the Legionaries. Renovating his home was “a pretty big resource, expensive, widely known at upper levels of the Legion,” says the priest. Maciel wanted Pironio’s approval of the Legion constitution, which included the private vows—never to speak ill of Maciel, or the superiors, and to weed out internal critics. The private vows were Maciel’s chief tool to conceal his sexual abuses, to secure lockstep obedience. Pironio had ordained fifty Legionaries to the priesthood. But cardinals on the consultors’ board at the Congregation for Religious balked at approving the constitution.

“Maciel went to the pope through Monsignor Dziwisz,” says Father A. “Two weeks later Pironio signed it.”

Whether John Paul read the document is doubtful. Dziwisz’s swift delivery suggests he was financially beholden to the Legion well before the $50,000 gift. For Maciel, the encoded trampling of individual rights
approved by the pope
was a huge victory. Several years after Pironio’s death, John Paul appointed Martínez Somalo, a diplomat, to head a renamed Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Maciel dispatched Father A to Cardinal Martínez Somalo’s home with an envelope. “I didn’t bat an eye,” he recalls. “I went up to his apartment, handed him the envelope, said good-bye.” He says the envelope held $90,000. “It was a way of making friends, ensuring certain help if it were needed, oiling the cogs, so to speak.” Martínez Somalo ignored the 1997 allegations against Maciel. John Paul later named him camerlango, or chamberlain, the official in charge of the papal conclave. Martínez Somalo rebuffed my interview requests put through the Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, and the receptionist at his home.

“Martínez Somalo was talked about a lot in the Legion … 
un amigo de Legion
,” recalls Glenn Favreau, a Washington, D.C., attorney who left the order in 1997 after seven years in Rome. Favreau, who was not abused by Maciel, explains: “There were cardinals who weren’t
amigos
. They wouldn’t call them enemies, but everyone knew who they were. Pio Laghi did not like the Legion.” Cardinal Laghi, a former nuncio to the United States, was prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education.

Of all the cardinals in the Curia, Sodano was the closest to Maciel. Their relationship dated to the Pinochet years in Chile, ideological soul mates from the start. In 1980 the Legion needed Cardinal Raúl Silva Henriquez’s permission to establish schools in Santiago. A critic of the Pinochet regime for its human rights atrocities, Silva had misgivings about
“los millionarios de Cristo,”
as some Mexicans derisively called them. Still, he met with the Legion emissaries, including the rector of Mexico’s Anáhuac University, which Maciel had founded in 1964. Several advisory bishops begged Silva not to admit them. “In a society as polarized as Chile at the time,” the journalist Andrea Insunza and Javier Ortega report, “the Legionaries found a key ally: the apostolic nuncio, Angelo Sodano.”
⁶⁷

Sodano backed the Legion and Opus Dei in Chile not just to blunt liberation theology advocates on the left. Neo-Pentecostal sects were wooing conservative Catholics who liked the scripture classes and felt a sense of mutual care in the emotional fervor of services. Catholic-style prosperity
theology embraced orthodoxy, papal loyalty, and free-market capitalism. Wealth-as-virtue begat gifts to the church. The tradeoff was tolerance of Latin American political repression versus the Soviet Communist brand. Silva, who helped labor unions in the police state, made human rights an issue. Sodano, who supported Pinochet, pressed the Legion’s case. Silva capitulated. Later, a Jesuit asked him why. “Don’t talk to me about it, please,” Silva said ruefully.
⁶⁸

Maciel put Father Raymond Cosgrave, an Irish Legionary, at Sodano’s disposal as a virtual aide-de-camp at the nunciature in Santiago. In 1989, on track to become secretary of state, Sodano took English classes in Dublin at a Legion school. He went on holiday at a Legion vacation home in Sorrento. Back in Rome, explains Favreau, “Sodano came over with his entire family, two hundred of them, for a big meal when he was named cardinal. And we fed them all. When Sodano became secretary of state there was another celebration. He’d come over for special events, like the groundbreaking for the Center for Higher Studies performed with a golden shovel. And a dinner after that.

“Cardinal Sodano helped change the zoning requirements to build the university in Rome,” continues Favreau. Sodano’s brother, Alessandro, was a building engineer caught up in Italian corruption charges in the early 1990s.
⁶⁹
The cardinal’s nephew, Andrea, the building engineer and later vice president of the Follieri Group, did work on the Regina Apostolorum. Two Legionaries on the project thought Andrea’s work was inadequate. When they suggested to Maciel that the bill not be paid, he yelled, “You pay him and you pay him now!” They did.

Maciel approved separate gifts of $10,000 and $5,000 to Cardinal Sodano, according to former Legionaries. These priests consider these funds the tip of the iceberg for Sodano. Sodano’s photograph hung in the Regnum Christi center in Rome, embroidering the cardinal’s persona as champion of a growing lay movement. Regnum Christi’s success was his success, too.

Sodano declined my interview requests through the papal spokesman, Father Lombardi. Calls to Sodano’s residence were referred back to the Vatican.

Maciel wanted Vatican approval for Regina Apostolorum as a Pontifical Academy, the highest level of recognition by the Vatican. This would put the freshly minted university on equal footing with the much older
Lateran and Gregorian universities. So it was, in 1999, that the Legionaries offered a Mercedes-Benz to Cardinal Pio Laghi, then-prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education (and former papal ambassador to the United States). Laghi, who has since died, was appalled and spurned the offer, according to Father B, who witnessed his outrage. Laghi’s successor, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, refused to grant the academic status. Regina Apostolorum lacked credentials in research, faculty, and international prestige, according to a knowledgeable official. The Lateran University, which was established in 1773, had received pontifical standing in 1910. In denying Maciel his university’s distinction, Grocholewski bucked the powerful Sodano. But Grocholewski, a Pole who had come to Rome as a seminarian in the cold war and never left, was a former prefect of the Signatura, confident of his position and ties to John Paul.

Sodano did Maciel a greater favor by pressuring Ratzinger to halt the canonical case in the CDF, as José Barba learned from his canon lawyer, Martha Wegan. Ratzinger, as archbishop of Munich and then as prefect of the CDF, had moved haltingly on other cases of sexual predators; the Vatican under John Paul had no uniform approach.
⁷⁰
His ideal of the priesthood as a chivalrous caste, resisting godless Communism, left him myopic, if not blind, to the cold truth of the 1990s as victims, lawyers, and journalists in English-speaking countries dug out evidence of appalling crimes in a clergy sexual underground.

Sodano was Machiavellian, Ratzinger a moral absolutist. Sodano’s reputation stood to suffer if Maciel were punished. By Sodano’s lights, the Maciel record of supplying vocations outweighed accusations from the 1950s on which Rome had already ruled. Truth didn’t matter anyway. This was Sodano’s logic in pushing a Vatican silent front as they eased out Groër, the pederast cardinal of Vienna. But Ratzinger could not have tabled a case as grave as Maciel’s without the approval of John Paul. The pope
is
the pope; they had a standing Friday lunch. In what now seems face-saving, Ratzinger told a Mexican bishop that an investigation of Maciel might not be “prudent,” as he had attracted so many men to the priesthood.
⁷¹
How tepid a rationale from the law-and-order prefect who had waged intellectual war against Leonardo Boff, Hans Küng, and Charles Curran: humiliate prolific theologians, but look the other way when it was time to condemn a pedophile?

On a visit to Regina Apostolorum, Ratzinger refused a pay envelope after a lecture on theology. “Tough as nails in a very cordial way,” says Father A.

Maciel maintained his power courtesy of a warped tribunal system. He continued traveling from Rome to Madrid, on to Latin America and North America, visiting Legion centers, meeting the donors. Father Stephen Fichter, today the pastor of Sacred Heart parish in Haworth, New Jersey, coordinated the Legion’s administrative office in Rome from February 1998 until October 2000. Fichter left the Legion for the diocesan clergy, earned a doctorate in sociology from Rutgers, and today is a New Jersey pastor and an associate at a Georgetown University research center. “When Father Maciel would leave Rome it was my duty to supply him with ten thousand dollars in cash—five thousand in American dollars, and the other half in the currency of the country to which he was traveling,” explains Fichter. “It was a routine part of my job. He was so totally above reproach that I felt honored to have that role. He did not submit any receipts and I would not have dared to ask him for a receipt … As Legionaries, our norms concerning the use of money were very restricted. If I went on an outing I was given twenty dollars and if I had a pizza I’d return the fifteen dollars to my superior with a receipt.”
⁷²

Besides Regina Apostolorum and the Center for Higher Studies, where Chris Kunze lived, Maciel built Mater Ecclesiae, a seminary in Rome for various dioceses; newly named bishops stayed there for training. Maciel grounded the Legion into the church infrastructure of Rome. Sitting at a 2000 celebrational lunch on the campus, Maciel saw Sodano, seated at another table, and snorted to a Legionary:
“Este hombre no toma paso sin guarache”
(This man does not make a move without having his feet covered; that is, getting something in return).

When Chris Kunze went to the Legion vacation house at Santa Maria de Termini near Sorrento, on the Mediterranean, for the 2000 summer break, his loneliness was acute. While there he met a young woman who was divorced with two children. As she confided about herself, his pastoral front softened; he spoke about his doubts. He kept his vow of celibacy, but in the emotional freedom realized that Legion life was eating at him like acid on the soul.

In the warm glow of an August evening he sat alone with Maciel in
the house, both of them wearing Mexican guayaberas. He said he had to leave; he was simply not cut out for life in the priesthood. He wanted to go back to America. “You’re wrong,” replied Maciel. “You have an important position. You must follow God’s will.” But, said Kunze, his loneliness was not new, he’d struggled with it years ago in Germany. Maciel frowned. “If I’d known that I wouldn’t have recommended you for the Vatican, Father Christopher.”
He doesn’t remember what I confided in letters from Germany
, realized Kunze,
because Legionary brothers ghostwrite his letters. How
could
he keep up with the deep personal details of so many men, so many letters? But I know he kept the letters …