Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  No one discussed the economic impact from the long tide of men leaving the priesthood, many of whom had raised funds and managed parish budgets. The exodus was like that of a college losing seasoned professors or a newsroom its veteran editors, forcing an operation to do more with less, sacrificing quality in the process.

  Monsignor Mauro Piacenza, a native of Genoa, slender, bespectacled, a devotee of opera, handled much of the Italian writing for Castrillón. Words poured out of Piacenza, written or spoken. The topics that animated him—theology, saints, a desire to shift control of the Curia from the Secretariat of State (under Sodano) to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (under Ratzinger)—were a tad sublime. But Kunze, who admired Ratzinger, shared Piacenza’s view of the CDF, the office where theologians’ works were judged for doctrinal purity, as a preferable high point of power in the Curia.

  Father Maciel was quite close to Cardinal Sodano, but the Legion’s more important champion was Pope John Paul II himself.

  In January 1979, on his first trip as pontiff, John Paul visited Mexico. Maciel sat on the plane with him, a reward for extensive advance work. Thanks to a Legionary priest who said private Masses for the First Lady, President José López Portillo decided to greet John Paul at the airport—a potent symbol in a heavily Catholic nation with a history of persecuted priests.20 Six months later, John Paul showed his appreciation with a visit to the Legionaries in Rome.21 A video camera captured priceless moments of Maciel with the pope.

  Troubled by the liberal drift of religious orders since Vatican II, John Paul was determined to restore the moorings of orthodoxy. As the priest shortage worsened, Maciel was competing with Opus Dei to recruit young men committed to papal teachings. The Legion had a financial engine in Regnum Christi, which had sixty thousand members, mostly laypeople, many of them upper middle class, some quite wealthy. One wing of Regnum Christi consisted of “consecrated women” who lived in communities, rather like nuns, staffing Legion prep schools. “One of the most powerful demonstrations of strength by the Legion,” the Spanish journalist Alfonso Torres Robles has written, “was its fiftieth anniversary celebration on January 3, 1991, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, when John Paul II ordained 60 Legionaries into the priesthood, in the presence of 7000 Regnum Christi members from different countries, 15 cardinals, 52 bishops, and many millionaire benefactors from Mexico [and] Spain.”22

  The pageantry filmed at ordination ceremonies was vital to the Legion’s Web and mail marketing, selling videocassettes or bestowing them on donors. “People who wanted to give money were quick to do so if they found that the group was united to the pope,” explains Glenn Favreau, who left the Legion in 1997 after thirteen years and had frequent dealings with Maciel. A 1991 film sequence shows a vibrant John Paul, clad in white, greeting a vast crowd of Legionaries and Regnum Christi members at a Vatican audience, amid waving banners and crescendo cheers as the Holy Father, with a deep voice and satisfied smile, calls out Father Maciel.

  The Legion had a $650 million annual operating budget, according to a 2006 Wall Street Journal report.23 An ex-Legionary who had held a high position says, “The budget was well over $1 billion, easily. How all the pieces operate is a mystery.” Whatever the budget, it was substantial for a small religious order with only 450 priests and 2,500 seminarians—the Jesuits numbered about 18,000. Wearing traditional cassocks or double-breasted blazers, walking in pairs, the Legionaries cut a distinctive image in Rome with their close-cropped hair.

  Christopher Kunze’s family had flown down to Mexico City for his ordination in 1994. He walked in file with fifty-three other Legionaries wearing white robes, each in turn pausing before Father Maciel for the ritual embrace in procession to the altar for a bow and a blessing by the papal nuncio, Archbishop Girolamo Prigione. The men lay prostrate, forming a vast white semicircular fan in symbolic obedience as forty thousand people in the domed stadium looked on. The Legion took out a half-page advertisement in El Universal and six other Mexico City dailies on December 5, 1994, featuring a photograph of Maciel kissing John Paul’s ring and an open letter from the pope calling him “an efficacious guide to youth,” in celebration of Maciel’s fifty years as a priest.

  In 1995 one of Kunze’s twin sisters, Elizabeth, joined the Movement, as Regnum Christi members called it. A former retail buyer with Neiman Marcus, she was twenty-nine, recently split from a boyfriend, hungering for a life with more meaning. “My parents divorced after my ordination,” Chris reflects. “I think that had something to do with Lizzie’s decision to join.” She began her immersion in Regnum Christi in Wakefield, Rhode Island.

  THE COURTING OF GABRIELLE MEE

  The Legion’s Rhode Island expansion was built on the legwork of Irish-born Father Anthony Bannon. Bannon oversaw Regnum Christi in North America from the Connecticut headquarters; he sent seminarians with priests on fund-raising calls to potential donors. Genvieve Kineke, who joined Regnum Christi in the midnineties, recalls a Bannon visit: “We’d break into groups, brainstorm, and then give a report on projected growth. We had about twenty women at the time, although some women from Massachusetts joined us for that event. Rhode Island is quirky and parochial. You can get around the state in an hour and a half, but people won’t go to Providence without an overnight bag. Rhode Islanders looked upon Regnum Christi with suspicion. Our numbers were low. I gave a summary presentation, outlining these human obstacles, laced with humor. Bannon gave me the look of death. He was furious. I sat down with my tail between my legs.”

  Bannon and another Irish priest, Owen Kearns, “were like a road team, raising money and seeking recruits,” says Kineke. “Things took off in the 1980s. They built a new wing for the novitiate in Cheshire, Connecticut, thanks to a seven-figure donation from [Reagan administration CIA director] William Casey and his wife. The Legion installed a plaque honoring their support.”

  Bannon arranged with Bishop Louis Gelineau of Providence and Mrs. Gabrielle Mee to host a reception for the Legion in March 1990 at the Narragansett home of former governor John Joseph Garrahy and his wife, Marguerite. Gabrielle Mee and Marguerite Garrahy attended daily Mass together. “This announcement and endorsement by the diocese was critical to the [Legion’s] securing of funds to purchase a facility,” observed the Rhode Island Catholic. In 1991 the Legion acquired a former convent in Wakefield, which became a Regnum Christi girls’ school, and two other religious estates. Overbrook Academy in Warwick Neck, a middle school for girls from Latin America and Spain, had a $35,000 tuition in 2009.24

  With high tuitions and low faculty salaries, Legion schools generated revenue for operating expenses in Rome, according to several ex-Legionaries. The widow Mee was a breakthrough in the Legion’s growth. A daily communicant since childhood, Gabrielle Dauray was thirty-seven and childless when she married Timothy Mee, a wealthy widower. The year was 1948. Each had a trail of sorrows. Timothy’s wife and children died when a hurricane destroyed their beach house ten years earlier. Gabrielle, the sixth of nine children, was raised in a fatherless home and had never known great comfort. Devoted to the church, Timothy Mee was a bedrock investor in Fleet National Bank. In 1982 he established trusts for himself and his wife. Since they had no direct heirs, the trusts would benefit charitable causes after their deaths. In 1985, when Timothy died, Gabrielle was seventy-four. Two years later, she established her own charitable trust, naming Fleet Bank as joint trustee.

  Gabrielle Mee was a classic Legion target—a devout, wealthy widow with scattered younger relatives. At a 1991 ceremony in Rome she joined Regnum Christi. In Rhode Island, as a consecrated woman, she made a promise of obedience to her superiors. She drew up a will to benefit the Legion. In 1994 she amended her trust, and Fleet amended the Timothy J. Mee Foundation (which had $15 million in assets) as a charitable trust: interest revenues from both were designated for Legion of Christ of North America, Inc.25 Besides $7.5 million gained from the Mee trusts, the Legion borrowed $25 million from Fleet to purchase a corporate complex
in Westchester County, New York, for an envisioned university. Mrs. Mee was eighty-nine in December 2000 when she changed her will, leaving the estate to the Legionaries of Christ, and appointed Father Bannon the executor of her will. She named Fleet Bank as coexecutor.

  Dave Altimari of the Hartford Courant recounts the next step:

  But soon the order and Mee filed a lawsuit against Fleet Bank, disputing how the bank was distributing the funds from her trusts. In 2003 she changed her will again, removing Fleet completely and naming Christopher Brackett, another Legionaries priest, based in Cheshire, as the co-executor.

  One of Gabrielle Mee’s two trusts was dissolved by a court order in 2003 with the remaining funds—more than $2.1 million—turned over to the Legionaries, records show. In June 2003, the Legionaries became the sole owners of a condominium she owned in Narragansett, R.I., assessed at more than $850,000.26

  The lawsuit with Fleet was settled out of court. As Mee lost contact with her family, a niece named Jeanne Dauray began to worry. In 2001 Dauray visited the Regnum Christi center. In five days she had not an hour alone with her aunt: another RC woman was always present, diverting the conversations from anything they didn’t like or at odds with the movement. When Mee wanted to visit a sister who was ill, Legion priests said no, disappointing the old lady. Dauray left disillusioned. Regnum Christi members called, beseeching her to join the Movement—the last thing she wanted. She had a few more phone calls with her aunt. “The feeling I had was that they had found a cash cow and they were never, ever going to let it go,” Dauray told Altimari.27 After Mee died, Dauray’s cousin sued to overturn the will.28

  Genvieve Kineke withdrew from Regnum Christi when she became pregnant with her fifth child. Soon thereafter, negative news coverage of Maciel, and conversations with other women leaving the Movement, bestirred Genvieve Kineke to launch a remarkable blog: life-after-rc.com.

  THE MODEL IMPORTED FROM MEXICO

  Maciel’s strategy of targeting wealthy women and oligarchs had been field-tested in Monterrey, the industrial capital of Mexico. Courting elite families, Maciel established private secondary schools, one for boys, one for girls. He exported to America a model for private schools to attract well-heeled families who would join Regnum Christi and give money and their children as future Legionaries or RC women. RC groups discussed Nuestro Padre’s letters. The highest level, lay celibates, lived in communities. Maciel’s order emulated Opus Dei, the order founded in Spain in the 1930s, whose lay celibates, called numeraries, donate portions of their salaries. But where Opus Dei’s founder stressed the sanctification of work by laypeople,29 Maciel’s goal was gaining wealth for the Legion. RC consecrated women, a cheap workforce, revered Nuestro Padre, and were, with designated priests, relentless fund-raisers.

  Maciel’s competition in Monterrey was with Jesuits, who had close ties to the upper class. Liberation theology gained popularity in Mexico in the 1960s. “The Jesuits would soon give up educating the wealthy,” writes the historian Enrique Krauze, “and turn their attention to ‘the Church of the poor.’ ”30 In major Mexican cities, Maciel’s schools would compete, but with a goal of capturing affluent supporters. In 1968 Eugenio Garza, a benefactor of the university Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, put pressure on the bishop to expel Jesuit chaplains from the campus and the order itself from the Nuevo León diocese. Five years later, in an unrelated event, Garza was killed by guerrillas in a botched kidnapping downtown. His funeral drew 200,000 people. “The murder shocked the business community, and chaos seemed imminent,” the New York Times reported later.

  The family soon broke up its holding company, the Monterrey Group, into four businesses that could be managed—and protected—more easily. Alfa, one of the four, grew so fast in the mid-to-late 70’s that it soon became Latin America’s largest privately owned company, with $2.49 billion in sales [in 1994]. Three of its divisions are steel, petrochemicals and prepared foods.31

  Eugenio Garza’s brother, Dionisio, grew close to Maciel, as did other members of the Garza family, which the Times likened to the Rockefellers. “One of my aunts gave Maciel a house,” says Roberta Garza, the youngest of Dionisio’s eight children. Born in 1966, Roberta Garza became an editor with Milenio newspaper in Mexico City. Her late father, “a conservative Victorian gentleman,” gave millions to the Legion. “Our family rarely watched TV. We came together after dinner and we talked.”32

  As a girl Roberta spent hours reading in her grandfather’s library. “Neither my grandfather nor his brother were close to the Legionaries—they thought them pompous,” she continues. “After my uncle expelled the Jesuits, that left a void. The Legion went house to house, assigning a particular priest to a family. Father Maciel stressed, You must do much for the church since God has given much to you. He was flanked by a young priest or two. They would let slip, out of earshot, Nuestro Padre is so close to God, he can see through your soul … I was convinced he was a holy priest. But some things made me skeptical. I didn’t like the way people adored him without any question. Women loved him.”

  When Roberta was eleven she went to France to board at an Academy of the Sacred Heart school. She read voraciously and began to write. During that time she received benevolent letters from Father Maciel. One of her older brothers, Luis Garza Medina (born in 1957), graduated from the Legion’s Irish Institute, a prep school in Monterrey. Under Maciel’s vision of a chosen elect, teachers encouraged students to see themselves as future priests or Regnum Christi servants. Roberta says that when Luis revealed his intention to become a priest, their father insisted he go to college first. At age sixteen Luis entered Stanford University and studied industrial engineering. “To make sure his vocation wasn’t lost amid California campus life,” explains Roberta, “the order sent a Legionary to room with him.”

  “That was Maciel’s standard policy,” explains a longtime friend of Luis’s. “When you are a third-degree Regnum Christi member, you cannot live on your own—you need to go in pairs. At the end of sophomore year, Father Maciel sent someone to live with him.” After graduating from Stanford in 1978, Luis Garza joined the Legion. He was ordained in seven years; most Legionaries took ten. Another Garza sibling, Paulina, joined Regnum Christi and moved to Rome.

  Roberta returned from Europe in 1980 for high school in Monterrey. She found it “rigid, highly traditional, but not analytical. One of my in-laws had a daughter who was not learning English. She complained to the Legionary priest. He actually told her: ‘The final judgment will not be in English.’ They were grooming us for the Movement. If your family had money, power, influence, they wanted you … It was crushing to come from France, where I could think freely. Their whole discourse was that whatever good you have is given by the grace of God—you must give back and fight the forces of evil. They sell you this paradise of moral rectitude. I was crying every night, thinking, This is my family, my home, but I don’t want to be here. I almost cracked up.”

  After the patriarch’s death, Maciel courted the widow Garza. “My mother gave him jewels and a lot of money,” says Roberta. “He targeted women in Mexico of a certain class who were not allowed to work. I had to fight to go to college. For cultured women who were bored, Maciel offered a sense of purpose.” With Luis a Legion priest and Paulina a consecrated RC woman in Rome, Maciel secured a flow of money from key members of the family. An electrifying speaker, Maciel could work a room of donors like a senator with silk between the fingers. Luis Garza—reserved, dignified, aloof—donated $3 million of his inheritance to the Legion, according to a colleague at the time. Roberta cannot confirm the figure but says it is within her brother’s means.

  Luis Garza declined my requests for an interview in e-mail replies.

  “One of my brothers hates the Legion more than I do,” explained Roberta, who left the Catholic Church after college. When the Garzas gather at holidays, they use good manners to avoid discussing the Legion.

  The eldest sibling, Dionisio Garza Med
ina—paternal namesake and longtime CEO of Alfa, the business founded by the grandfather—became a Legion benefactor. He told Jose de Cordoba of the Wall Street Journal: “The Legion is the only Mexican multinational in the world of religion.”33 It made business sense for Maciel to appoint thirty-five-year-old Luis Garza as vicar general in 1992. He functioned as the chief financial officer, “responsible for overseeing key areas of logistical governance,” according to a Regnum Christi profile, “often behind a desk, involving constant analysis of numbers and personnel structures and organizations, risks and opportunities.”34

  Christopher Kunze found Luis Garza determined, driven, and cold.

  “In one of his talks,” says Kunze, “he explained how successful heart surgeons worked. They’d have highly trained people do the prep work on the patients; the surgeon would then come in to do so many procedures a day, close the arteries, and earn all the money. He held that out as an example for the Legion, like a business model. We were supposed to work with leaders in the world, wealthy and powerful people we should convert for Christ.”

  In early 1997 Father Garza traveled to various Legion centers, “giving a talk, telling us that some information had been made public about Nuestro Padre in a newspaper,” explains Kunze, “that it was all lies, curiosidad malsana—an unhealthy curiosity. And if anyone should send us a newspaper clipping we should not read it, but put it an envelope and send it immediately to him in Rome.” Kunze was in Mexico City, living in the religious community at the Legion’s Anáhuac University, working with a Regnum Christi center in the vast smoggy metropolis. For months he had been suffering from insomnia and a sadness he felt uncomfortable discussing. The warrior mystique had given way to a loneliness he had never known. In keeping with the internal vows, to avoid slander as moral cancer, Kunze gave little mind to the prohibited article.