Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  “We had no idea what the false accusations were about,” he continues, “except that there had been a conspiracy against Maciel from the early days of the Legion, and we must show our allegiance. We renewed our vows twice a year. They made us sign an agreement that we’d never sue the Legion … I was starting to wonder about all this when Father Maciel called me in Mexico and said there was a job for me with Cardinal Castrillón in the Vatican.”

  THE ASCENDANCY OF NUESTRO PADRE

  The youngest of five boys, Marcial Maciel Degollado was born on March 10, 1920, into a family of nine children. His hometown, Cotija de la Paz, lies in the southwestern state of Michoacán, which today is a front line in Mexico’s grisly drug wars. His father, Francisco Maciel Farías, a Creole of French-Spanish descent, owned a sugar mill and several ranches. Ridiculed by his father for being a sissy and subjected to whippings by his brothers, he kept close to his mother, Maurita, who was reputedly pious. “There will be no faggots in my house,” snapped Francisco, sending his son to work with mule drivers for six months to shape up as a man. The mule drivers sexually assaulted him and another boy, according to an informant of the Mexican scholar Fernando M. González.35 The story tracks what Maciel confided to Juan Vaca, among the first Legion seminarians he abused.36 Hungry to vanquish the shame, Maciel entered the seminary at sixteen in the aftershocks of a society that had been crippled by war.

  The Mexican Revolution of 1910 began when Francisco Madero, a reform-minded patrician, raised a small army against the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Díaz, a former general who descended on one side from Zapotec Indians, had become a figure of Victorian pomp and ruthless power after ruling for thirty-four years. Speaking of men he had had executed for stealing telegraph wires, he told a reporter, “Sometimes we were relentless to the point of cruelty. The blood that was spilled was bad blood.”37 Porfirio Díaz gave huge land concessions to local gentry and foreign individuals and firms, driving rural masses deeper into poverty, while inciting war with the Yaqui and Mayo Indians. “He had the chieftains of the latter tribe put on a warship, chained together, and dumped into the Pacific Ocean,” writes Carlos Fuentes. “Leaders of the Yaqui rebellion were murdered, and half of the tribe’s total male population (30,000 people) were deported … Where was this barbarism coming from? From the city, from the countryside? One thing was certain, the ideology of progress overrode all objections.”38

  In 1907 the American economy crashed. Drought and poverty worsened in rural Mexico. Seven months after Madero’s revolt, as bombs blew rail-cars off the tracks, Díaz fled to Paris. Madero was elected president in 1911 and murdered after a coup in 1913. The revolution erupted in regional uprisings rather than a mass rebellion, though many states saw attacks on mines and big haciendas.39 The 1917 constitution codified labor rights, state control of natural resources, and, in reaction to a powerful Catholic hierarchy, the banning of monasteries, Catholic schools, and denial of voting rights for clergy. Two more presidents were assassinated. By 1919 a wrecked economy had left 1 million of Mexico’s 15 million people dead.40 Plutarco Elías Calles gained power, a pro-labor revolutionary who prized industry over land redistribution. Calles improved public education and used the church as a whipping post.

  Maciel as a boy saw men hanged in public. The Michoacán of his childhood was a hotbed of Catholic resistance. Cotija was called “town of the cassocks” for its many priests. Maciel came from “good blood.” Of his four uncle-bishops, Rafael Guízar Valencia ran a 1930s clandestine seminary in Mexico City and is memorialized in a statue in Cotija’s plaza. Father Maciel would nominate Guízar, and his mother, Maurita, for sainthood, and later anticipate his own. (“Don’t start my canonization process until I’ve been dead thirty years,” he told aides at a 1992 ceremony in Rome.)41 Another uncle, Jesús Degollado Guízar, was a pharmacist-turned-general in the Cristero uprising. In 1922 the Mexican bishops launched the Catholic Labor Confederation (CLC) to counter Calles’s manipulation of unions. That enraged Luis Napoleón Morones, the labor minister. As the CLC mushroomed to eighty thousand members, Calles and Morones sent armed thugs against priests and churches.42 The bishops closed the churches on July 31, 1926. Four hundred men bunkered into a Guadalajara church, firing at federal troops. As the revolt spread across southwestern Mexico, many bishops and priests fled. Cristeros rallied behind the slogan Viva Cristo Rey!—Long Live Christ the King! Landowners, working families, peasants, and Indians fused interests “like a fire deep down in the earth,” writes the historian Jean A. Meyer. “The army was a federation of republics and communities in arms. Sometimes it really was a case of a village republic, or the confederation of an entire region … and sometimes the women and children followed the men into the desert and abandoned the village.”43

  Calles had greater firepower, but the vast sweep of lower Mexico posed a huge logistical challenge. The Cristeros reacted “against the social lawlessness that was becoming the rule … It was neither conservatism nor revolution, but reform.”44 As the battles intensified, bishops who fled (many to San Antonio, Texas) were aghast at soldiers wearing Christian crosses who cut off the ears of Communists. Fernando M. González writes pejoratively of Cristero priests who died in battle and were turned into martyred saints decades later.45 Despite the small number of clerics who actually fought, and the scorn of some intellectuals for its “orthodox utopia,”46 the Cristeros drew unlikely allies, campesinos and hacienda owners, forging religious liberty as a common cause.

  In 1929, six months after the Vatican’s Lateran Pact with Mussolini, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, brokered a truce after discussions with the Holy See. Mexico agreed to respect Catholic rights without purging its anticlerical laws. Excluded from the talks, Cristero leaders disbanded because of a treaty endorsed by the pope. Degollado protested by telegram to Pius XI; he spent several years in hiding as other Cristero leaders were systematically murdered. Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory is set in the Cristero struggle. “The peasants got into the churches in Veracruz,” Greene wrote on a 1937 research trip, “locked the doors and rang the bells; the police could do nothing, and the governor gave way—the churches were opened.”47

  In 1941, with Mexico comparatively calm, twenty-one-year-old Marcial Maciel Degollado organized a community of thirteen boys in the basement of a house in the capital. Their families had no idea he had been expelled from two seminaries for reasons never disclosed. No Mexican seminary would accept him, despite his quartet of uncles in the hierarchy. The house belonged to Talita Retes, a benefactress who guided Maciel to well-to-do families with memories of clandestine Masses and priests shot by goons. In 1944 Bishop Arias ordained his nephew. “Maciel had this incredible charisma,” one of the original disciples recalled.48 To the affluent Mexicans, Venezuelans, and Spaniards living in Mexico he approached, the idea of an elite order of priest-educators—soldiers for Christ—had powerful appeal. In 1947 the textile-manufacturing brothers Guillermo and Luis Barroso helped him purchase an estate in Mexico City’s Tlalpan area that had previously been owned by Morones, the labor potentate and Cristero enemy. With fields for sports and lagoons for boat rides, Maciel named it Quinta Pacelli, honoring Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli).

  In the 1950s Maciel gained the support of Flora Barragán de Garza—a precursor of the widow Mee and Roberta Garza’s mother (no relation). Flora’s late husband, Roberto Barragán, a Monterrey industrialist, left her a fortune. She gave Maciel a Mercedes and funds for expansion. From Spain, Legion seminarians wrote her letters on their progress. After she died, her daughter Florita, embittered, told José de Jesús Barba Martin that Flora had given the Legion $50 million over the years. A college professor in Mexico City, José Barba cannot verify the figure, but says, “Flora’s support was substantial.”49

  Like many of the apostolic schoolboys, José Barba came from a family of Spanish ancestry. Barba was eleven when he entered the Legion in Mexico City in 1948. He left the order in 1962 and later earned a doctorate at Harvard
in Latin American literature. He has done extensive research on the Legion. “Maciel was in the habit of buying things in cash,” states Barba. “He was twenty-seven when he purchased the Morones estate. In 1950 he began construction on the Instituto Cumbres (the first prep school in Mexico City, on land Flora provided). That summer he also inaugurated Collegio Massimo in Rome. He was thirty. In 1953 he tried to start construction of a college in Salamanca. I was there. The bishop was sick; he failed to lay the cornerstone. He began the work in 1954 and completed it four years later. It was also in 1954 that he purchased the old spa in Ontenada, Spain, which had its own lake, for another seminary. Again, he paid cash. Father Gregorio López told me he delivered the money, wrapped in thin paper, to Leopoldo Corinez, representing the brothers who sold one of the last family properties. I do not know the exact amount.”

  The first boy Barba met in 1948 at Tlalpan was eleven-year-old Juan Vaca, the son of a Cristero–turned–village undertaker. When the youths arrived in Spain, brimming with esprit de corps, Maciel had arranged for classes at the Jesuit-run Comillas Pontifical University. Juan Vaca was twelve the night Maciel summoned him to his quarters: Nuestro Padre was in bed, writhing in pain, beckoning Vaca to come and massage his stomach, then guiding the boy’s hands down into a coercive psychosexual entanglement that gripped Vaca for the next twelve years and haunted him thereafter. Sometimes Maciel had two boys at once.

  In 1950 the Jesuit authorities forced Maciel to take his charges and leave Comillas. Maciel was trying to steal recruits from the Comillas diocese seminarians, and the Jesuits knew of Maciel’s sexual abuses.50 Maciel arranged for the youths to study in nearby Cobreces, and later Ontenada. As they moved on to Rome, Vaca, Barba, and other apostolic schoolboys (not all of them sexual victims) watched Maciel wallow in addiction to a morphine painkiller called Dolantin. Injecting himself and dispatching young couriers with bribes for doctors in Rome, he fell into stupors. In 1956 a strung-out Maciel landed in Salvator Mundi International Hospital in Rome. Cardinal Valerio Valeri, a reed-thin former diplomat and prefect of the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, was incensed over letters from Tlalpan’s rector and an older seminarian in Mexico City who had seen Maciel self-inject and worried about his behavior with boys. Entering the hospital room, eyes narrowed, Valeri told Vaca, “Get back to your place!”51

  Cardinal Valeri suspended Maciel as the Legion director general; he arranged for Carmelite priests to assume control. They began questioning the boys, eight of whom admitted years later to Gerald Renner and me how they lied to protect Maciel and their own vocations lest the Carmelites deem them sinners.52 “We didn’t know what to do,” said Vaca. “Our lives would have ended.” In keeping with clerical custom, Valeri was discreet about Maciel’s suspension. Out of the hospital and persona non grata in Rome, Maciel followed the money between Spain and Latin America, raising donations for the big project in Rome that loomed as his salvation: Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica.

  Still in ecclesiastical limbo, Father Maciel in 1958 completed a seminary in Salamanca, Spain, with financial help from Josefita Pérez Jiménez, the daughter of a former Venezuelan dictator.53 Despite Valeri’s suspension order, Maciel suffered no loss of standing in his travels. His drug use would ebb and roll for decades. In 1958 Maciel got his break when Pope Pius XII died. Cardinal Micara, now the vicar of Rome, signed an order reinstating Maciel—something for which, in the interregnum between popes, Micara had no authority. Canon law puts the decision making of most Vatican officials on hold until a new pope is elected. What was Cardinal Valeri to do? Expend his version of political capital with the new pope, John XXIII, by protesting the reinstatement of a druggie priest who had lines to enough cash to erect a basilica? Maciel regained power on an illicit order from a cardinal he had given $10,000 to twelve years before. As Fuentes wrote of the dictator, “The ideology of progress overrode all objections.” Micara had blessed the basilica’s cornerstone. Maciel had the money to finish it.

  Like the captive American soldiers brainwashed by Communists in The Manchurian Candidate, a cold war film, the Legionaries bore the psychological scars of Maciel’s tyranny for decades to come. Unlike the movie characters, dozens of ex-Legionaries never forgot what Maciel did to them—nor his confiding that he had permission from Pius XII for his sexual relief. The idea of clergy abuse survivors speaking out lay many years in the future.

  In 1972 Maciel sent Father Juan Vaca to Connecticut to guide the Legion’s American operations. In 1976 thirty-nine-year-old Vaca left the Legion and joined the clergy of the Rockville Centre, Long Island, diocese. Vaca wrote Maciel a searing twelve-page letter listing twenty other victims. He also gave the letter to his bishop, John R. McGann.54 Bishop McGann questioned a second ex-Legionary priest in his diocese, Felix Alarcón, who admitted that Maciel abused him, too. McGann sent their statements to the Vatican. Nothing happened. Vaca petitioned the Vatican to take action in 1978, again to no avail. In 1989, having left the priesthood, Vaca sent his original document with an impassioned letter to John Paul II, via Vatican channels. He asked for official dispensation of his vows, arguing that his ordination was invalid; he wanted a church blessing for his civil marriage. In 1993 he got the dispensation but nothing on the allegations.

  Vaca’s classmates took years to reconnect and admit among themselves what Maciel had done. A languages professor named Arturo Jurado, after reading Lead Us Not into Temptation, contacted me in 1993 and put me in touch with José Barba. When the Hartford Courant reporter Gerald Renner called to see if I knew much about the secretive religious order in Connecticut, I had sworn statements from eight men. Renner’s call led to a joint assignment.

  Our lengthy report on Maciel’s abuse of Legion youths ran in the Courant of February 23, 1997. Refusing to be interviewed, Maciel denied the accusations through a Washington, D.C., law firm, which sent documents by Regnum Christi members accusing Vaca and the others of a conspiracy against Maciel. The conspiracy charge lacked the salient fact of a motive. The Courant published Maciel’s letter reasserting his innocence, praying for his accusers. A website LegionaryFacts.org, and the Legion’s newspaper, the National Catholic Register, defended Maciel, counterattacking the accusers (and journalists). The Vatican refused to answer our calls, not even a “no comment.” But the silence meant no assertion of Maciel’s innocence. Most of the mainstream media ignored the story until the 2002 abuse crisis; however, in Mexico City, the daily La Jornada did a follow-up series and a cable station, Channel 40, ran a documentary interviewing Barba, Vaca, and others. An advertisers’ boycott nearly killed the station.

  Ironically, Father Kunze’s computer in the Congregation for the Clergy gave him the first taste of freedom: in 1999 he followed a Google link to the forbidden article and was astounded to read the allegations of men, by name, including “a priest, guidance counselor, professor, engineer and lawyer.”

  Some of the men, now in their 50s and 60s, wept during the interviews. All said the events still haunt them.

  They said they were coming forward now because Pope John Paul II did not respond to letters from two priests sent through church channels in 1978 and 1989 seeking an investigation, and then praised Maciel in 1994 as “an efficacious guide to youth.”

  “The pope has reprimanded Germans for lack of courage during the Nazi era. We are in a similar situation. For years we were silent. Then we tried to reach authorities in the church. This is a statement of conscience,” said Jose de J. Barba Martin, one of the men …

  Each one said Maciel was addicted to painkilling drugs despite his being cleared of that accusation in the Vatican investigation.55

  The flashback hit Kunze like a gust of freezing wind: in a hotel room near the Legion center in Les Avants, Switzerland, in 1992, Kunze stares at Nuestro Padre’s open suitcase, lined with tiny, white-capped orange plastic bottles filled with powder, no prescription labels. Kunze thinks, I know Father Maciel’s sick, but why does he need all these drugs? His superior, Father Fergus O’Car
roll, says Maciel has doctors’ permission to mix his own drugs.

  Kunze read on. “Maciel would summon a boy to his room at night and be in his bed, writhing in apparent pain, and ask the boy to rub his stomach.” And the memory Kunze had tried to stuff welled up again: still in 1992, himself at the wheel of Father Maciel’s favored Mercedes, the priest in the backseat telling him to “pull over” just before they cross into Belgium. Nuestro Padre leans forward, his fingers reaching onto Chris’s right forearm, his hand stroking him. “Oh, how strong you are,” purrs Maciel. “The nurses help me, they give me massages when I have pain.” The strapping young celibate, ever-sensitive to sexual stoicism, thinks, He’s not only touching me, he’s talking about massages—is he really coming on to me? Kunze’s resistant body language sent Maciel sinking softly into his seat. When Kunze returned to Germany, his Legionary brothers were full of wonder about his lucky drive alone with Nuestro Padre. Obedient to the private vows, he told them how good the trip had been, the weight of his mendacity so thick that some nights he cried in his room. We are all sinners, he told himself, even Father Maciel. He had stayed in the Legion despite Maciel’s advances: Why did I do that? His family, two years after the encounter in the car, had gone to Mexico City for his ordination ceremony. His sister, Lizzie, was a Regnum Christi celibate teaching at a girls’ finishing school in Switzerland while he, stricken with doubt, reeling from memories of Maciel he had failed to expunge, read how Juan Vaca “hand-delivered” a letter to Maciel “with a list of 20 victims.” Father Owen Kearns, to whom Kunze made his cathartic forty-five-minute confession in Cheshire, told the newspaper, “Vaca is seeking revenge because he was incompetent in his job and was being demoted.” Vaca disputed that claim but acknowledged that despondency over years of abuse had affected his ministry. (Vaca, in fact, resigned with a hand-delivered letter to Maciel in Mexico City on April 4, 1976.)