Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  The archdiocese had turned down an earlier offer of $2 million from a different church. “A discussion with former [archdiocesan] chancellor David W. Smith lends credence to the notion that [the Boston archdiocese] was reluctant to get the word out that it was unwilling to convey the property to another religious institution, no matter what the nature of the denomination,” wrote Kevin J. Herlihy, the retired judge. “Mr. Smith also left no doubt that the Vicar General, Bishop Richard G. Lennon, D.D., saw, read and presented the memo dated January 19, 2006 to the [archdiocesan] Board of Consultors recommending no restriction in the deed to Indresano. Although the memo purports to be from Smith to the Vicar General, Smith could not rule out with certainty the possibility that Bishop Lennon actually prepared the recommendation.”24

  By the time Judge Herlihy’s report was released, in October 2007, Lennon’s disastrous handling of Reconfiguration in Boston had catalyzed nine parishes into vigil and another round of canonical appeals in Rome. Cardinal O’Malley resisted sending in the police. He was relieved, however, to wash his hands of Lennon. In the culture of ecclesiastical princes, where mistakes are often rewarded, Richard Lennon would soon be moving on, and up, to assume a diocese of his own.

  CHAPTER 7

  FATHER MACIEL, LORD

  OF PROSPERITY

  Father Christopher Kunze was thirty-six when he began work at the Congregation for the Clergy in December 1997. His admiration for Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos grew quickly. The Colombian prefect with a silver mane and patrician bearing “spoke all the modern languages and knew Arabic, Hungarian, and Russian,” Kunze recalls. Journalists covering the Vatican considered Castrillón papabile, a cardinal on the short list to become pope.

  Chris Kunze was an American. At six foot two, with receding blond hair and an easy smile, he was pursuing a master’s in theology at the university his religious order, the Legion of Christ, was building in Rome. His Vatican salary was about $28,000, which he signed over to the Legion. Kunze spoke German and therein lay his value. Cardinal Castrillón needed an undersecretary for case work from Germany and Austria. Kunze had spent several years in the Cologne archdiocese as a university chaplain, working to secure a presence for the Legion’s network of schools. The Jesuits and the Dominicans were centuries-old teaching orders, but the Legionaries had begun their mission only a half century earlier, during World War II. The founder with an extravagant name, Marcial Maciel Degollado, was a Mexican who fostered a militant spirituality and rock-ribbed loyalty to the pope.

  Father Maciel had befriended Castrillón, then president of the Latin American bishops’ council, in the late 1980s. Praised by Gabriel García Márquez as “this rustic man with the profile of an eagle,” Castrillón was a scourge of liberation theology, the Latin American movement of “a Church being born from the faith of the poor,” in the words of the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff.1 Castrillón believed in helping the poor, but he looked to the prevailing winds from Rome. In 1985 Cardinal Ratzinger jolted the Brazilian bishops by imposing a yearlong “silence” on Boff, which turned the prolific Franciscan into a national hero. A student of Ratzinger’s in Germany years before, Boff had likened the Vatican tribunal that judged theologians to “a Kafkaesque process wherein the accuser, the defender, the lawyer and the judge are one and the same.”2 Boff wanted open theological inquiry. Ratzinger attacked him for an “uncritical use of Marxist mode of analysis.”3 In a dispassionate account of the conflict, Harvard Divinity professor Harvey Cox observed:

  In their famous meeting at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, the Latin American bishops proclaimed that the church should exercise a preferential option for the poor. Liberation theology is an expression of this preference. It is the attempt to interpret the Bible and Christianity from the perspective of the poor. It is in no sense a liberal or modernist theological deviation. Rather, it is a method, an effort to look at the life and message of Jesus through the eyes of those who have normally been excluded or ignored … [Liberation theologians] work closely with the burgeoning “Christian base communities” of Latin America. These are local groups of Catholics, most of whom are from the lowest tiers of society, whose study of the Bible has led them to become active in grassroots political movements. Thus liberation theology provides both an alternative to the topdown method of conventional academic and ecclesial theology as well as a source of guidance to the long-neglected people at the bottom.4

  “Boff will have to ask God to forgive him,” huffed Castrillón, “and when God answers, then the pope and I will know whether to forgive him or not.”5

  When John Paul II summoned Castrillón to the Curia in 1996, the Colombian had an ally in Father Maciel, who sent young Legionaries to move his boxes into the Vatican apartment. Castrillón was grateful, although they smashed a leg of his grand piano which had to be fixed. Sending seminarians to do heavy lifting folded into Father Maciel’s way of cultivating Vatican officials.

  Chris Kunze had barely seen the surface of Maciel’s politesse.

  Rome was in a postwar shambles when Maciel, an obscure young priest, arrived in 1946 in hopes of meeting Pope Pius XII. He had been ordained only two years, but at that ceremony in Mexico City a cameraman filmed the twenty-four-year-old at the altar, with steepled fingers and a deep sigh as in the opening scene of a cinematic life. The footage would be used for the Legion’s lucrative marketing in later years.6 Maciel founded his order while in private tutelage for the priesthood under Francisco González Arias, one of his four uncles who were bishops, and the one who ordained him. Maciel, twenty-six, had gone to Rome via Madrid, seeking scholarships the Franco government had announced for Latin American seminarians to study in Spain. The Spanish foreign minister, Alberto Martín-Artajo, told Maciel he needed Vatican approval if his Mexican “apostolic schoolboys” were to qualify for the Spanish benefits.7

  With the backing of several of Mexico’s wealthiest families, including that of its president, Miguel Alemán Valdés, Maciel wangled a meeting with Clemente Micara, a newly named cardinal. Maciel, tall, lean, with fair brown hair and searchlight eyes, spoke no Italian; Micara, a portly sixty-seven-year-old diplomat, spoke Spanish. Maciel gave Micara $10,000, “a huge sum in a city reeling from the war,” says a priest with seasoned knowledge of Legion finances.8 The Legion of Christ: A History (all but dictated by Maciel and published by a Legion imprint) makes no mention of Maciel giving funds to Micara; however, it says that Maciel traveled with “a confidential document and a sum of money” from Mexico’s apostolic delegate (nuncio) for Cardinal Nicola Canali, the governor of the Vatican city-state.9 Canali, a leading Fascist sympathizer during the war, got along well with Maciel, who was a devotee of General Franco.10 The two cardinals helped Maciel gain an audience with Pope Pius XII. Maciel returned to Madrid with letters of approval that allowed the apostolic schoolboys from Mexico to study in Spain. But why would the Holy See, with established channels to transmit documents, entrust sensitive material to a priest without a diplomatic passport? The other part of the story, “a sum of money,” was the shape of things to come.

  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,11 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.12 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.”