‘There is a lot of tolerance within the Church, so much so that it is not expressed outside it. And, of course, to protect this secret, clerics must attack gays by appearing very homophobic in public. That’s the key. Or the trick.’
Having investigated the Legion of Christ and Marcial Maciel, Emiliano Ruiz Parra is particularly critical about the Vatican, both in the past and in the present day, and about the many sources of support that the predator was able to rely on in Mexico. Like many others, he suggests financial arguments, corruption and bribes, as well as the homosexuality of some of his supporters, as key factors.
‘If Marcial Maciel had spoken, the whole of the Mexican Church would have collapsed.’
One of Marcial Maciel’s first great charitable works, the one that launched his career and overshadowed his original turpitudes, was the construction of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Rome. It is supposed to be a miniature replica of the famous basilica of the same name in Mexico, one of the most enormous in the world, which welcomes millions of pilgrims every year.
In both cases these are places of great devotion, striking for their archaic and almost sectarian rituals. The devoted and prostrated crowds strike me every time I visit the Mexican basilica. Frenchman that I am, and familiar with the rather intellectual Catholicism of my country – that of the Pensées of Pascal, the funeral orations of Bossuet or the Genius of Christianity by Chateaubriand – I have difficulty understanding this fervour and popular religiosity.
‘Mexican Catholicism is inconceivable without the Virgin of Guadalupe. Love of the Virgin, like a mother’s love, shines all around the world,’ Mgr Monroy explains.
This former rector of the basilica in Mexico City showed me around the religious complex, which, apart from two basilicas, includes convents, museums and shops, and in the end looks to me like a real tourist industry. Mgr Monroy also showed me many pictures there presenting him in every conceivable priestly outfit (including a magnificent portrait by the gay artist Rafael Rodriguez, whom I also interviewed in Santiago de Querétaro, in the north-west of Mexico).
According to several journalists, Our Lady of Guadalupe was the context for a number of sexual scandals and, through the behaviour of some of its priests, a kind of ‘gay fraternity’. In Mexico City as well as Rome.
On Via Aurelia, west of the Vatican, the official Italian headquarters of the Legion of Christ was financed by young Maciel in the early 1950s. Thanks to an incredible collection of funds carried out in Mexico, Spain and Rome, the church and its parish were built beginning in 1955 and inaugurated by the Italian cardinal Clemente Micara late in 1958. At the same time, during the interregnum between Pius XII and John XXIII, the critical Vatican file on Marcial Maciel’s drug addiction and homosexuality quietly disappeared.
To try to understand the Maciel phenomenon in the shadow of the purity of the Virgin of Guadalupe, we must therefore try and understand the protection that made this vast scandal possible, both in Mexico and in Rome. Several generations of Mexican bishops and cardinals, and countless cardinals in the Roman curia, closed their eyes to or knowingly supported, one of the biggest paedophiles of the twentieth century.
What can we say about the Marcial Maciel phenomenon? Was he a mythomaniac, pathological and devilish pervert, or was he the product of a system? An isolated accidental figure or the sign of a collective shortcoming? Or, to put it another way, is this the story of a single individual, as is suggested by some to clear the institution of blame, or the product of a model of government rendered possible by the vow of chastity, the secret and endemic homosexuality within the Church, by lies and the law of silence? As with the priest Karadima in Chile, and many other cases in numerous countries in Latin America, according to the witnesses I interviewed the explanation comes down to five factors – to which I should add a sixth.
First of all, the blindness that comes from success. The dazzling successes of the Legion of Christ fascinated the Vatican for a long time, because nowhere in the world was the level of recruitment of seminarians so impressive, priestly vocations so enthusiastic and financial revenue so vast. During John Paul II’s first visit to Mexico, in 1979, Marcial Maciel showed his sense of organization, the power of his political and media connections, his ability to sort out the tiniest details, with an army of assistants, while remaining humble and discreet. John Paul II was literally amazed. He went back to Mexico four times, fascinated each time by the skills of his ‘dear friend’ Maciel.
The second factor is the ideological proximity between John Paul II and the Legion of Christ, a far-right and violently anti-communist organization. Ultra-conservative, Marcial Maciel was the spearhead first in Mexico, then in Latin America and Spain, of the fight against Marxist regimes and the trend of liberation theology.
Obsessively anti-communist, even paranoid, Maciel anticipated the pope’s expectations, and the pope duly found him a defender of his hard line against communism. By doing so, combining the psychological with the ideological, Father Maciel intelligently caressed the pride of John Paul II, a mystical pope whom witnesses privately describe as a man of great vanity and a misogynist.
The third factor, connected with the previous one, is John Paul II’s need of money for his anti-communist ideological mission, particularly in Poland. It seems certain by now, in spite of the denials of the holy see, that Marcial Maciel siphoned off funds to finance the Solidarność union. According to a minister and a senior diplomat I spoke to in Mexico, these transfers of funds remained within an ‘ecclesiastical’ context. In Warsaw and Kraków, journalists and historians confirm to me that there were financial relationships between the Vatican and Poland. ‘Money definitely circulated. It went through channels like the trade unions, churches,’ I am told by the Polish Vaticanologist Jacek Moskwa, a long-time correspondent in Rome and the author of a four-volume biography of Pope John Paul II.
But during the same interview in Warsaw, Moskwa denied any direct involvement on the part of the Vatican. ‘Many people have said that the Vatican Bank or the Italian Banco Ambrosiano made contributions. I think that is false.’
In the same way, the journalist Zbigniev Nosowski, head of the Catholic media service WIEZ in Warsaw, has shown himself to be quite reserved in his comments on these financial arrangements, ‘I don’t think that there is any possibility that money transferred from the Vatican to Solidarnosc.’
Quite apart from the principle at stake, other sources suggest the opposite. Lech Walesa, the former head of Solidarność, became President of the Polish Republic, and did in due course admit that his union received money from the Vatican. Many newspapers and books have also confirmed this: their payment came from the Legionaries of Christ of Marcial Maciel and was indeed received by Solidarność. In Latin Amercia, many even think, with no less certainty, that the Chilean dictator Auguste Pinochet made some contribution to these payments (thanks to the intervention of the Nuncio, Angelo Sodano) as well as drug traffickers from Colombia (through the offices of Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo). At this point, all these hypotheses are possible, but they have never been confirmed beyond doubt. ‘Dirty Money for Good Causes’, proclaims one of those who examined the dossier: the origins of the payments may be clouded in mystery but the justice of the cause made it all legitimate.
Through direct witnesses, we know for certain that Mgr Dziwisz, the private secretary of Pope John Paul II, had the habit of handing out to Polish visitors envelopes containing cash, whether they were clergy of members of the laity. At this time in the 1980s, the Union Solidarność was banned in Poland by law. Dziwisz used to ask his Polish visitors, ‘How can I help you?’. The lack of funds was always top of the list. ‘What used to happen was that this assistant of the Pope went off to a room next door and came back with a fat envelope’. This was the testimony of Adam Szostkiewicz, when I interviewed him in Warsaw. (An influential journalist on the weekly Polityka, Szostkiewicz has been a long-time observer of the Catholic Church in Poland. He was himself a memb
er of Solidarność, and for six whole months was imprisoned by the Communist regime.)
According to Szostkiewicz, there were other means of access to Poland for food, medicine and maybe even suitcases of money. These means of access were essentially ‘ecclesiastical’: the aid came via the priests and via humanitarian convoys who came through Federal Germany. Never did the money come via the RDA nor through Bulgaria, because in these territories the controls were extremely strict.
Catholics thus benefited from a freedom unavailable to others: the Polish authorities tolerated these activities and their inspection of goods was really quite cursory. Moreover, ‘clergy were able to get visas much more easily’, added Szostkiewicz. (In a recent book, Il Caso Marcinkus, the Italian journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona reveals that the Vatican could well have transferred more than a million dollars to Solidarność. The American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus and Stanisław Dziwisz were the essential agents in these extremely complex arrangements. The Pope’s second assistant, the polish priest Mieczysław Mokrycki, known simply as Father Mietek, who is now an Archbishop in Ukraine, also played a key role in all of this, as well as the Jesuit priest Casimiro Przydatek. Both of these were close friends of Dziwisz. Journalistic investigation into all this was conducted and published in the journal Gazeta Wyborcza. It is entirely likely that more revelations on these matters will follow in the months and years ahead).
The suitcases containing money were a gift only made possible under the pontificate of John Paul II. One might consider this all to be somewhat questionable, but the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland and subsequently the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire, can indeed be seen to legitimise this usage of holy money.
Then there are the personal bribes – because we have to use the term. Marcial Maciel gave regular handouts to prelates within the Curia. The psychopath rewarded his Roman protectors and enriched them to an unimaginable degree. He gave them luxury cars, sumptuous trips abroad and envelopes full of banknotes, both to gain influence and to win favours for his sect of ‘legionnaires’, and to cover up his crimes. These facts are well established today, but none of the prelates who allowed themselves to be corrupted have been troubled by the authorities, let alone excommunicated for simony! A few of them did refuse the dirty money, and it appears that Cardinal Ratzinger, with his bachelor’s austerity, was one of them. Having received an envelope of banknotes in Mexico, he is said to have returned it to the sender. Cardinal Bergoglio, it seems, was always a declared enemy of Marcial Maciel and denounced him early on, not least because Maciel hated not only the ‘red priests’ of liberation theology, but also the Jesuits.
Apart from the moral aspects, the financial risks taken by the Vatican are another factor – the fifth – that might explain the Church’s silence. Even when it acknowledges the evidence, it doesn’t want to pay the price! In the United States, cases of sexual abuse have already cost hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to the victims. For the Vatican, to acknowledge a mistake is to accept financial responsibility. The argument concerning the cost of compensation is central in all cases of sexual abuse.
Finally – and here we are in the realm of the unthinkable – within the support that Marcial Maciel received in Mexico, Spain or the Vatican, there is something that I would modestly refer to as ‘closeted clericalism’. That’s the sixth factor that helps us to explain the inexplicable, probably the most painful, the deepest too, and perhaps the most important clue. Many cardinals around John Paul II in fact led a double life. Certainly, they are not, or only rarely, paedophiles; they do not necessarily commit acts of sexual abuse. On the other hand, most of them are homosexual and engaged in lives known for their duplicity. Several of these cardinals have regularly visited male prostitutes and resorted to dubious sources of finance to satisfy their inclinations. It is certain that Marcial Maciel, a dark soul, went far beyond what is tolerable, or legal, as everyone in the Vatican agrees, but to denounce his mental patterns would have meant questioning their own. It would also have meant exposing themselves to the possible revelation of their own homosexuality.
But once again this could be the explanation: the culture of secrecy which has become necessary to protect the homosexuality of priests, bishops and cardinals in Mexico and in Rome – above all among high ranking priests in the Pope’s immediate entourage – allowed the paedophile Maciel, thanks to the culture of clericalism, freedom to act as he wished and to be securely protected.
Once one starts equating paedophilia with homosexuality – as many cardinals have given the impression of doing, the differences blur. If everything is mixed up together, sexual abuse and sin, paedophilia, homosexuality, prostitution, and the crime differs only in its extent, not in its nature, who is to be punished? Here is where the priests get lost: What is up, what is down? Where are Good, Evil, Nature and Culture? What rules apply to me, and which to others? Can Marcial Maciel be excommunicated for his sexual crimes if, a bit like him, one is also stuck in a sexual lie, and oneself ‘intrinsically disordered’? To denounce abuse is to expose oneself to no good end and, who knows, perhaps run the risk of being denounced likewise. Here we are at the heart of the secret of the Maciel case and all the paedophile crimes that have been uncovered, and that continue to be exposed, in the Vatican and among the Catholic clergy: an army of supporters, countless excuses and endless silences.
11
The Ring of Lust
‘In the Vatican, he’s known as Platinette, and everyone admires his daring!’ I am told by Francesco Lepore. The nickname comes from a famous drag queen on Italian television who wears platinum-blond wigs.
I’m amused by these pseudonyms privately given to several cardinals and prelates. I’m not making anything up, merely pointing out what several Curia priests have revealed to me, the nastiness being even crueller inside the Church than outside it.
An influential diplomat tells me of another cardinal whose soubriquet is ‘La Mongolfiera’! Why this name? He has a ‘splendid appearance, nothing inside and can’t carry very much’, my source explains, stressing the supreme arrogance and vanity of the person in question – ‘a piece of confetti who thinks he’s a hot-air balloon’.
Cardinals Platinette and La Mongolfiera enjoyed their moment of glory under John Paul II, to whom they were reputedly close. They were part of what might be called the first ‘ring of lust’ around the holy father. Other lubricious circles existed, gathering together practising homosexuals at less elevated levels of the hierarchy. Heterosexual prelates were rare among those close to John Paul II; chastity was rarer still.
Before we go any further, we should look in greater detail at the cardinal vices that I am about to reveal. Who am I to judge? Once again, I am trying to be ‘non-judgemental’, and I am less concerned with ‘outing’ living priests than with describing a system – these prelates will therefore remain anonymous. In my eyes, these cardinals, bishops and priests have the right to have lovers, and to explore their inclinations, whether acquired or innate. Not being Catholic, I couldn’t care less if they appear to be betraying their vow of chastity, or if they are in contravention of the rules of the Church. As for prostitution, which occurs so frequently in this group, it is legal in Italy and apparently very well tolerated by canon law as applied in the extraterritorial zone of the holy see! The profound hypocrisy of such clergy, however, is questionable: that is the principal subject of this book, which confirms the fact that the infallibility of the pope becomes impunity when it’s a matter of the morals of his entourage.
My concern here is to decode this parallel world and provide a guided tour of it during the time of John Paul II. Apart from La Mongolfiera and Platinette, to whom I shall return, I must begin with a discussion of the figure of Paul Marcinkus, the man behind the finances and secret missions of the Catholic Church, and one of those whose tasks it was to manage the Vatican City for the holy father.
A mixture of diplomat, bodyguard, translator from English, golf-playe
r, transporter of secret funds and crook, the American archbishop Marcinkus already had a long history at the Vatican behind him when John Paul II was elected. Marcinkus was a key translator into English for Paul VI, as well as his bodyguard. He even thwarted an attempt on the life of Paul VI, and occupied several posts in the apostolic nunciatures before beginning his spectacular Roman ascent.
For mysterious reasons, Marcinkus became one of John Paul II’s favourites at the beginning of his pontificate. According to several sources, the pontiff had a ‘genuine affection’ for this controversial Vatican figure. Marcinkus was soon appointed head of the famous Vatican Bank, which was involved in countless financial intrigues and several spectacular scandals under his auspices. The prelate was accused of corruption and found guilty by the Italian courts, but for a long time he enjoyed Vatican diplomatic immunity. He was even suspected of being behind several murders, including that of John Paul I, who died mysteriously after a month in the pontificate, but these rumours have never been proven.
Marcinkus’s homosexuality is well attested, on the other hand. About a dozen Curia prelates who associated with him confirm that he was an adventurer with a hearty appetite.
‘Marcinkus was homosexual: he had a weakness for Swiss Guards. He often lent them his car, a metallic grey Peugeot 504 with a lovely leather interior. At one point I remember that he was going out with a Swiss Guard and it lasted for some time,’ I am assured by one of my sources, a layman close to the archbishop who worked in the Vatican at the time, as indeed he does today.
We also know of another of Marcinkus’s relationships: the one that he had with a Swiss priest, who confirmed their liaison to one of my sources. And even when he was forced to stay within the Vatican after being found guilty by the Italian courts, he went on cruising shamelessly. He then retired to the United States, taking his secrets with him: the American archbishop died in a luxury retirement home in 2006 in Sun City, Arizona. (On the two occasions when – in the presence of Daniele – I interviewed Piero Marini, Pope John Paul II’s ‘master of ceremonies’, Marini innocently stressed Marcinkus’s ‘great closeness’ to ‘the workers’. For his part, Pierre Blanchard, a layman who was for a long time the secretary of APSA, the Administration for the Patrimony of the Holy See, and very familiar with the Vatican networks, gave me other information.
In the Closet of the Vatican Page 31