In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  During the same period, the Slovenian cardinal Franc Rodé likewise showed his support for the founder of the Legion, and hailed ‘the example of Father Maciel in following Christ’. (When I recently interviewed Rodé recently, he assured me that he ‘didn’t know’, and gave me to understand that Maciel was supported by the pope’s assistant, Stanisław Dziwisz: ‘When Dziwisz was created cardinal, at the same time as me, the Legion held a huge party for him – and not for me,’ he told me.) As for Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who is now prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, he cleared his dicastery of blame on the grounds that Maciel was a religious and therefore not dependent on him. He also pointed out that since Maciel had never been consecrated a bishop or created a cardinal, it was proof that he was treated with suspicion …

  What can we say, finally, about the final public support given by John Paul II to Maciel in November 2004? On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the priest’s ordination, the pope came in person, in the course of a beautiful ceremony, to say goodbye to Maciel. The photographs of the two men, affectionately embracing, while the pope was on the brink of death, went all around the world. In Mexico they were on the front page of several newspapers, prompting disbelief and unease.

  It would not be until the death of John Paul II, in 2005, that the Maciel file was reopened by the newly elected pope, Benedict XVI. He authorized the opening of the archives of the Vatican so that the inquiry could be conducted, and freed the Legion from their ‘vow of silence’ so that they could speak.

  ‘History will acknowledge that Benedict XVI was the first to denounce paedophilia and bring charges against Marcial Maciel, as soon as he ascended the throne of St Peter,’ Federico Lombardi says to me, the former spokesman of Benedict XVI and now president of the Ratzinger Foundation.

  In 2005, Marcial Maciel was stripped of all his duties by Benedict XVI, who also obliged him to retire from public life. Reduced to ‘penitential silence’, he was definitively suspended a divinis.

  But under cover of official sanctions, Benedict XVI spared the priest once again. Maciel would not be able to administer the sacraments until the end of his days. His punishment was still quite lenient, however, more so than the penalty imposed on great theologians such as Leonardo Boff or Eugen Drewermann, who were punished for committing no crimes other than defending their progressive ideas. Marcial Maciel was not reported to the law by the Church; he was not excommunicated, or arrested, or imprisoned. There was not even a trial according to canon law ‘because of his advanced age and frail health’.

  Invited to a ‘life of prayer and penitence’, between 2005 and 2007 Maciel continued to travel from one house to another, from Mexico to Rome, and to take advantage of his limitless funds. He simply moved to the United States to avoid possible trials – embodying the famous phrase: ‘Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States’. Suffering from pancreatic cancer, he retired in the end to a sumptuous residence in Florida, where he died in luxury in 2008, at the advanced age of 88.

  It was not until the following year, in 2009, that an investigation into all organizations connected with the Legion of Christ, and its lay branch Regnum Christi, was ordered by Benedict XVI. Five bishops were put in charge of this mission of inquiry covering five continents. Their results, communicated confidentially to the pope in 2010, seem to have been so critical that the Vatican finally acknowledged in a communiqué the ‘objectively immoral acts’ and ‘true crimes’ of Marcial Maciel.

  However, wittingly or not, Rome delivered a partial judgement. In denouncing the black sheep, it indirectly spared his entourage, starting with Fathers Luis Garza Medina and Álvaro Corcuera, Maciel’s deputies. In 2017, the Paradise Papers would reveal that Medina and Corcuera, among about twenty Legion priests whose names were published, and who were not disturbed by Benedict XVI, enjoyed secret funds thanks to offshore financial arrangements via Bermuda, Panama and the British Virgin Islands. It would also be discovered that 35 other priests belonging to the Legion of Christ were implicated in sexual abuse scandals, not only their founder. It would be another few years before Pope Benedict XVI would put the Legion under the tutelage of the Vatican and appoint a provisional administrator (Cardinal Velasio De Paolis). Since then the file appears to have been closed and the Legionnaires have resumed their normal lives, merely taking down the countless portraits of the guru from the walls of their schools and forbidding his books – simply erasing his traces, as if nothing had happened.

  New cases just exploded. Óscar Turrión, the rector of the Pontifical International College of Legionnaires, called the Maria Mater Ecclesiae in Rome, where about a hundred seminarians from all over the world lived, and acknowledged that he lived secretly with a woman, with whom he had two children. He had to resign.

  Rumours circulate even today in Mexico, but also in Spain and Rome, about the lay branch of the Legion, Regnum Christi, and about their pontifical university, Ateneo Pontificio Regina Apostolorum, where there were signs of deviation. The Mexican journalist Emiliano Ruiz Parra, a specialist in the Catholic Church, admitted his frustration when I interviewed him in Mexico. ‘Neither Benedict XVI nor Francis grasped the extent of the phenomenon. And the problem remains: the Vatican no longer has any control over the Legion and it might have returned to its bad habits.’

  Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez lives in a well-appointed Catholic residence in Tlaquepaque, a satellite town of Guadalajara in Mexico. I visit him there, on Calle Morelos, with Eliezer, a local researcher, who acts as my guide and who has managed to dig up his telephone number. The cardinal agreed to the interview without any procrastination, asking to meet us at his home that same evening.

  His emeritus archbishop’s residence is a little paradise luxuriating in the tropics, protected by two armed Mexican policemen. Behind a wall and some grilles, I find the cardinal’s domain: three brightly coloured houses, huge, connected by a private chapel and garages where several gleaming Ford four-by-fours are parked. There are four dogs, six parrots and a marmoset. The Archbishop of Guadalajara has just retired, but his timetable doesn’t seem to have dried up.

  ‘The Catholic Church in Mexico was rich. But now it’s a poor church. You must realize, for a country of 120 million inhabitants we have only 17,000 priests. We were persecuted!’ the prelate insists.

  Juan Sandoval Íñiguez is one of the most anti-gay cardinals in Mexico. Frequently using the word ‘maricón’ (faggot) to describe homosexuals, the cardinal has radically denounced the use of condoms. He has even celebrated masses against the ‘satanism’ of homosexuals, and most importantly he was the inspiration behind the anti-gay-marriage movement in Mexico, marching at the head of demonstrations against the Mexican government. The Legion of Christ, to which he was close, often organized large battalions and street processions. During my stay in Mexico, I was also able to witness the big ‘marcha por la familia’ against the gay-marriage plan.

  ‘It’s civil society mobilizing spontaneously,’ the cardinal comments. ‘I don’t engage personally. But of course natural law is the Bible.’

  The bird-lover is a charmer, and he keeps me for several hours to talk in French. Sometimes he takes me kindly by the hand, to emphasize his arguments, or addresses Eliezer tenderly in Spanish to ask his advice, or to ask questions about his life.

  What is strange, and what strikes me straightaway is that this anti-gay archbishop is obsessed by the gay question. It’s almost the only subject we talk about. Here he is, implicitly criticizing Pope Francis. He reproaches him for giving signs favourable to gays and, apparently in passing, serves me up the names of some of the bishops and cardinals in his entourage who appear to him to have similar tastes.

  ‘You know, when Francis says the words “Who am I to judge?” he isn’t defending homosexuals. He’s protecting one of his colleagues; it’s very different!! It’s the press that tampered with everything!’

  I ask the cardinal’s permission to look at his library, and he gets up, keen to show
me his treasures. A ‘bas-bleu’ prelate, he himself has written several books, which he enjoys pointing out to me.

  What a surprise! Juan Sandoval Íñiguez had whole shelves devoted to the gay question. I see works about homosexual sin, the issue of lesbian and gay conversion therapies. A whole library of pro- and anti-gay texts, as if the book-burnings that the cardinal constantly advocated had no business taking place at his home.

  Suddenly I’m startled to notice several copies, in plain view, of the famous Liber Gomorrhianus in English translation: The Book of Gomorrah. ‘It’s a great book, from the Middle Ages and, look, I wrote the preface to this new translation,’ the cardinal says to me proudly.

  What a strange book! This famous essay from 1051 has been signed by an Italian priest who would go on to become Saint Peter Damian. In this long treatise, addressed to Pope Leo IX, the cleric denounced homosexual tendencies, which he said were very widespread, among the clergy of the time. He also pointed a finger at the bad habits of priests who confessed to each other in order to conceal their inclinations, and he even ‘outed’, long before the term had been coined, some senior Roman prelates of the day. The pope, however, disavowed Peter Damian, and imposed none of the sanctions that he demanded. He even confiscated his tract, according to John Boswell, who relates the story, all the more so since the College of Cardinals was very practising at the time! The book has considerable historical importance, because it was from the publication of this pamphlet in the eleventh century that the divine punishment of Sodom would come to be reinterpreted not as a problem of hospitality, as the Bible suggests, but as a sin of ‘sodomy’. Homosexuality became abominable!

  We are now talking to Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez about the treatments that exist to ‘detoxify’ homosexuals, and also paedophiles, whom he appears to consider equal to the former. There is also mention of a specialist clinic meant for the most ‘incurable’ paedophiles’. But the cardinal dodges the question and refuses to expand on the subject.

  But I know that this residence exists. It’s called ‘Casa Alberione’, and was founded in 1989 on the initiative, or with the support, of the cardinal in this very parish of Tlaquepaque. Foreign paedophile priests, ‘sent from country to country as if they were nuclear waste’, in the words of someone who knows the subject very well, were treated in this ‘rehab’ clinic, which enabled them to stay on as priests and to avoid getting the law involved. From the early years of the 2000s, after Pope Benedict XVI stripped paedophiles of church protection, Casa Alberione lost the reason for its existence. After an interview in the Mexican daily newspaper El Informador, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez acknowledged the existence of this residence, which has received Legionnaires of Christ, but asserted that it ‘had stopped taking in paedophile priests in 2001’. (A similar institution existed in Chile, ‘The Club’, about which Pablo Larraín made a film.)

  ‘HOLA!’ All of a sudden I’ve been called by a shout from behind, while the cardinal, Eliezer and I are walking in the park. I turn around in surprise, but without being as frightened as Robinson Crusoe when he first hears a parrot talking to him on his island. From its huge cage, the handsome perico has just begun a conversation with me. It is going to tell me a secret? In Mexico, this kind of bird is also called ‘guacamayo’.

  We walk among the peacocks and the roosters. The cardinal seems to be happy and takes his time. He is breathtakingly kind to me and Eliezer, my Mexican scout.

  The dog ‘Oso’ (which means ‘Bear’) is also enjoying our company, and all of a sudden we throw ourselves into a four-man game of football, the cardinal, the dog Oso, Eliezer and me, to the amusement of five nuns who cook, clean and do the washing-up full time for the cardinal.

  I question Juan Sandoval Íñiguez: ‘Don’t you feel a bit lonely here?’

  My question seems to amuse him. He describes his rich social life. I quote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom, I say, ‘the vow of celibacy was unnatural’.

  ‘Do you think there is less loneliness among married priests, or imams?’ the cardinal replies: an answer in the form of a question.

  ‘You see,’ he adds, pointing to the nuns, ‘I’m not alone here.’

  The cardinal takes me firmly by the arm, and continues, after a long silence: ‘And besides, there is also a priest here, a young priest, who joins me every afternoon.’ When, late that afternoon, I’m surprised not to have seen the young priest, the cardinal adds, perhaps with some candour: ‘Tonight he finishes at 10 pm.’

  The kinds of protection that Marcial Maciel enjoyed in Rome are quite well known today. Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez has been criticized by several victims of the paedophile priest for not denouncing him. He is also alleged to have placed some of his priests under ‘re-education’ at Casa Alberione. (The cardinal denies any wrongdoing or responsibility.)

  Similar criticisms were directed at the Archbishop of Mexico, Cardinal Norberto Rivera. As obsessively anti-gay as Sandoval Íñiguez, he made numerous anti-gay speeches, including statements about ‘the anus which cannot serve as a sexual orifice’. In another famous remark, he acknowledged that there were many gay priests in Mexico, but that ‘God had forgiven them’. More recently, he even declared that a ‘child is more likely to be raped by his father if his father is homosexual’.

  Specialist journalists suggest that Norberto Rivera, one of the supporters of Marcial Maciel, thoroughly denied his crimes and supposedly failed to pass on certain complaints to the Vatican. For all of these reasons, and for having publicly dismissed complainants as fantasists, the cardinal of Mexico is now the subject of criticism for his failures and silence concerning sexual abuse. He is regularly denounced in the press, and tens of thousands of Mexicans have signed a petition to mobilize public opinion and prevent him from taking part in the conclave that elects popes. He also appears towards the top of the list of the ‘dirty dozen’, the 12 cardinals suspected of covering up for paedophile priests, published by the American Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

  Sandoval Íñiguez and Rivera were created cardinals by John Paul II, probably on the recommendation of Angelo Sodano or Stanisław Dziwisz. Both were violent opponents of liberation theology and homosexual marriage. Pope Francis, who had sharply criticized Cardinal Rivera for his homophobia, and solemnly asked the Mexican Church to cease hostilities against gays, hurried to move on from the Rivera case by making him retire in 2017, as soon as he had reached the age limit. This quiet decision was, according to a priest I interviewed in Mexico, a ‘divine sanction with immediate temporal effect’.

  ‘We know that a very significant number of clergy who supported Marcial Maciel or who are demonstrating against us and against gay marriage are homosexual themselves. It’s unbelievable’, the Minister of Culture, Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, tells me during an interview in his office in Mexico.

  And the well-known minister adds, in the presence of my Mexican editor, Marcela González Durán: ‘The religious apparatus in Mexico is gay, the hierarchy is gay, the cardinals are gay. It’s incredible!’

  The minister also confirms to me, when I tell him the subject of my book, that the Mexican government has precise information about these ‘anti-gay gays’ – of which he gives me several names among dozens. He adds that the next day he will talk about my investigation to the president of the Republic, at that time Enrique Peña Nieto, and to the Minister of the Interior, so that they can give me additional information. I would go on to have several further exchanges with Tovar y de Teresa. (I was also able to interview Marcelo Ebrard, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the former mayor of Mexico, who was the main architect of plans to approve gay marriage in the country, and who knew which Catholics opposed this legal plan. Other individuals would provide me with information, including the billionaire Carlos Slim Jr, the intellectual Enrique Krauze, several directors of Televisa, the main television channel, an influential adviser to President Enrique Peña Nieto, and José Castañeda, the former Minister of Foreign Af
fairs. On four visits to Mexico City, and in eight other towns and cities in the country, I received support and information from a dozen gay writers and activists, notably Guillermo Osorno, Antonio Martínez Velázquez and Felipe Restrepo. My Mexican researchers Luis Chumacero and, in Guadalajara, Eliezer Ojeda, also contributed to this story.)

  The homosexual life of the Mexican clergy is a well-known and by now a well-documented phenomenon. It is estimated that over two-thirds of Mexican cardinals, archbishops and bishops are ‘practising’. An important homosexual organization, FON, has even ‘outed’ 38 Catholic leaders, making their names public.

  This proportion is said to be less significant among mere prelates and ‘indigenous’ bishops, among whom, according to a report officially delivered to the Vatican by Mgr Bartolomé Carrasco Briseño, 75 per cent of diocesan priests in the states of Oaxaca, Hidalgo and Chiapas, where native Americans are in the majority, live with women, either cohabiting or secretly married. In short, the Mexican clergy is said to be actively heterosexual in the countryside and practising homosexual in the cities!

  Several journalists specializing in the Catholic Church confirm these tendencies. This is the case with Emiliano Ruiz Parra, author of several books on the subject and a former journalist reporting on religious questions for the daily newspaper Reforma: ‘I would say that 50 per cent of priests are gay in Mexico, if you want a minimum figure, and 75 per cent if one is being more realistic. The seminaries are homosexual and the Mexican Catholic hierarchy is spectacularly gay.’

  Ruiz Parra adds that being gay in the Church is not a problem in Mexico: it is even a rite of passage, an element of promotion and a normal ‘power relation’ between the novice and his master.