Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  These are the conspirators Luis Garza warned us against, Kunze realized, but this sounds true! Obedient to the private vows, he said nothing to his fellow Legionaries. A lonely sense of futility haunted his identity as a priest. As the days rolled down to Christmas, he watched seminarians in the basement prepare the gift baskets for Legion friends in the Curia. The spectacle of fine wines, liqueurs, and cured hams deepened Kunze’s sadness. What am I doing here? He had no idea other Legionaries felt guilt about the Legion’s materialism.

  The Christmas gifts were divided into categories by declining levels of importance, a Legion priest told me in Rome in 2009. “Legionary brothers are sent in cars to deliver them to cardinals and other allies, always for a purpose—to gain power for the Legion and Maciel,” he said. “A small gift, I understand; but a large gift is a bribe … Fine Spanish hams cost quite a lot—30 euros per kilo. You can spend a thousand dollars for a large one.”56

  AN ELEGANT WAY OF GIVING A BRIBE

  First Things editor Father Richard John Neuhaus had come out swinging in a March 8, 1997, letter to the Courant, denouncing “the scurrilous charges that have been lodged against Father Maciel” and praising the Legionaries. The Vatican gave a more Olympian endorsement that fall: John Paul named Maciel one of twenty-one papal delegates to the Synod for America in Rome. The National Catholic Reporter called it “a distressing message … [that] the church does not really take sex abuse accusations seriously.”57 Maciel mingled with hierarchs and lay notables like Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who also lectured at Regina Apostolorum. Neuhaus, since his early years as a Lutheran pastor arrested at 1960s antiwar protests, had swung to the right, becoming a Catholic, a priest, and a Republican polemicist, forging ties with evangelical leaders like Chuck Colson and gaining support from conservative foundations.58 At the synod he sat by Maciel. “Most of the secretarial and logistical assistance here seems to be handled by the Legionaries,” wrote Neuhaus.59 “Events with their seminarians and priests are marked by a festive sense of delight, complete with ample wine and exuberant mariachi bands, reflecting a sheer joy in being invited to throw away their lives for Christ.”60

  Throwing away their lives is how several Legion priests, unaware of Kunze’s gloom, had begun to feel about Maciel’s use of money. None of them knew that in October 1998 José Barba and Arturo Jurado filed a canonical case in Cardinal Ratzinger’s office, seeking Maciel’s expulsion for absolving “sins” of his victims in confession, an issue over which the CDF had a tribunal on which to rule. An official asked the men to keep silent. As they left, the Mexicans saw Ratzinger and knelt in respect, kissing his ecclesial ring.61

  Accusations against the head of an international religious order were a rarity for the Vatican justice system. Each congregation has its competenza, or responsibility. Most congregations fielding requests from bishops or superiors to punish sex abusers did not have tribunals, legal arenas to pass judgment. The 1997 accusations should have put Maciel’s fate in the CDF, which has its own tribunal, apart from the major canonical courts at the Signatura, the Rota, and the Apostolic Penitentiary. Canon law is administrative and does not provide open trials or jury deliberations. Tribunal cases dragged on for years. The real issue was whether anyone in the Vatican wanted to take action against a high priest. The few cases to cross Kunze’s desk were passed to Castrillón.

  The Maciel accusations also confronted the competenza of Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo, the Spanish prefect of the congregation overseeing religious orders. His office, one floor above that of Clergy, should have launched an inquiry: Maciel was superior general of an order. Martínez Somalo had presided at a 1985 ordination of Legionaries at Rome’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica.

  Because Maciel was highly favored by the Holy Father, the accusations concerned Sodano as papal chief of staff. John Paul’s 1994 praise of Maciel as “an efficacious guide to youth” now called his judgment into question.

  Maciel had used large sums of money to insulate himself from justice.

  In 1995, according to former Legion insiders, Maciel sent $1 million to John Paul, via Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz, when the pope traveled to Poland. As papal secretary, the Polish-born Dziwisz (pronounced Gee-Vish) was the man closest to John Paul for decades. Handling money was part of his job. In the Vatican’s 1980s alliance with Solidarity, Dziwisz persuaded Polish authorities to overlook customs duties on trucks with imported goods, many of which carried up to $2,000 cash, in small bills, to help the resistance.62 Dziwisz slept down the hall from John Paul in the papal living quarters.

  Maciel had previously arranged for Flora Barragán to attend a private Mass said by John Paul II. The chapel in the Apostolic Palace seats forty people in a milieu graced by Michelangelo’s frescoes The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of St. Peter.63 Mass there was a rare privilege for the visiting dignitary, like British prime minister Tony Blair and his family. “Mass would start at 7 a.m., and there was always someone in attendance: laypeople, or priests, or groups of bishops,” Dziwisz wrote.

  They often found the pope kneeling in prayer with his eyes closed, in a state of total abandonment, almost of ecstasy, completely unaware of who was entering the chapel … For the laypeople, it was a great spiritual experience. The Holy Father attached extreme importance to the presence of the lay faithful.64

  “I accompanied a wealthy family from Mexico for a private Mass and at the end, the family gave Dziwisz $50,000,” explains Father A, who left the Legion and spoke on background. The $50,000 payment was in 1997, the year Maciel was publicly accused. “We arranged things like that,” the priest said of his role as go-between. Given the pope’s ascetic lifestyle and accounts of his charitable giving, such funds could have been routed to a deserving cause. Did Dziwisz salt away some for himself? His book says nothing about donations and does not mention the Legion. Father A brooded about the Legion’s pipeline to the pope: “This happened all the time. Dziwisz provided frequent appearances for Legion supporters, which was huge” in helping the order.65 “It was always cash. And in dollars. You’d need too many notes for lire. Even in Mexico they preferred using dollars over pesos.”

  Maciel threw out the stops for a lavish reception in 1998 honoring Dziwisz’s elevation as a bishop, down to the festive Mexican music played, Mariachi-style, by a small Legionaries’ orchestra.

  Father B, who also steered payments to Dziwisz for Legion patrons, says, “It’s not so much that you’re paying him for a person to go to Mass. You’re saying, ‘These people are fervent, it’s good for them to meet the pope.’ The expression is opere de carità: ‘We’re making an offering for your works of charity.’ In fact, you don’t know where the money is going. It’s an elegant way of giving a bribe.”

  On assignment for National Catholic Reporter, I tried to reach Dziwisz, now a cardinal in Kraców, for comment. Iowana Hoffman, a Polish journalist in New York, translated a letter with questions and faxed it to Dziwisz’s press secretary; he reported back that the cardinal “does not have time for an interview”—nor, indeed, for a statement defending John Paul’s use of the funds.66

  Father B, who called the gifts an elegant bribe, explains why he left the Legion: “I woke up and asked: Am I giving my life to serve God, or one man who had his problems? It was not worth consecrating myself to Maciel.” Cardinals and bishops who said Mass for Legionaries received payment of $2,500 and up, according to the importance of the event, the men said.

  Do large sums of cash to a Vatican official constitute bribery? The money from Maciel went to heads and midlevel people at congregations through the 1990s. Such exchanges are not bribes in the view of canonist Nicholas Cafardi, the dean emeritus of Duquesne University Law School in Pittsburgh. Cafardi, who has worked as a legal consultant for many bishops, responded to a general question about large donations to priests or officials in the Vatican. Under canon 1302, a large financial gift to an official “would qualify as a pious cause,” says Cafardi. The Vatican has no oversight
office; funds should be reported to the cardinal-vicar for Rome. An expensive gift, like a car, need not be reported. “That’s how I read the law,” Cafardi explains. “I know of no exceptions. Cardinals do have to report gifts for pious causes. If funds are given for the official’s personal charity, that is not a pious cause and need not be reported.”

  “Maciel wanted to buy power,” says Father A, in explaining why he left the Legion. Morality was at issue. “It got to a breaking point for me [over] a culture of lying. The superiors know they’re lying and they know that you know. They lie about money, where it comes from, where it goes, how it’s given.”

  With prescient calculation, Maciel had sunk money into the Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes by paying for the renovation of the residence of its prefect from 1976 to 1983, the late Cardinal Eduardo Francisco Pironio, according to Father A. Raised in Argentina, the youngest of twenty-two children born of Italian émigré parents, Cardinal Pironio enjoyed meals and socializing with the Legionaries. Renovating his home was “a pretty big resource, expensive, widely known at upper levels of the Legion,” says the priest. Maciel wanted Pironio’s approval of the Legion constitution, which included the private vows—never to speak ill of Maciel, or the superiors, and to weed out internal critics. The private vows were Maciel’s chief tool to conceal his sexual abuses, to secure lockstep obedience. Pironio had ordained fifty Legionaries to the priesthood. But cardinals on the consultors’ board at the Congregation for Religious balked at approving the constitution.

  “Maciel went to the pope through Monsignor Dziwisz,” says Father A. “Two weeks later Pironio signed it.”

  Whether John Paul read the document is doubtful. Dziwisz’s swift delivery suggests he was financially beholden to the Legion well before the $50,000 gift. For Maciel, the encoded trampling of individual rights approved by the pope was a huge victory. Several years after Pironio’s death, John Paul appointed Martínez Somalo, a diplomat, to head a renamed Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Maciel dispatched Father A to Cardinal Martínez Somalo’s home with an envelope. “I didn’t bat an eye,” he recalls. “I went up to his apartment, handed him the envelope, said good-bye.” He says the envelope held $90,000. “It was a way of making friends, ensuring certain help if it were needed, oiling the cogs, so to speak.” Martínez Somalo ignored the 1997 allegations against Maciel. John Paul later named him camerlango, or chamberlain, the official in charge of the papal conclave. Martínez Somalo rebuffed my interview requests put through the Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, and the receptionist at his home.

  “Martínez Somalo was talked about a lot in the Legion … un amigo de Legion,” recalls Glenn Favreau, a Washington, D.C., attorney who left the order in 1997 after seven years in Rome. Favreau, who was not abused by Maciel, explains: “There were cardinals who weren’t amigos. They wouldn’t call them enemies, but everyone knew who they were. Pio Laghi did not like the Legion.” Cardinal Laghi, a former nuncio to the United States, was prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education.

  Of all the cardinals in the Curia, Sodano was the closest to Maciel. Their relationship dated to the Pinochet years in Chile, ideological soul mates from the start. In 1980 the Legion needed Cardinal Raúl Silva Henriquez’s permission to establish schools in Santiago. A critic of the Pinochet regime for its human rights atrocities, Silva had misgivings about “los millionarios de Cristo,” as some Mexicans derisively called them. Still, he met with the Legion emissaries, including the rector of Mexico’s Anáhuac University, which Maciel had founded in 1964. Several advisory bishops begged Silva not to admit them. “In a society as polarized as Chile at the time,” the journalist Andrea Insunza and Javier Ortega report, “the Legionaries found a key ally: the apostolic nuncio, Angelo Sodano.”67

  Sodano backed the Legion and Opus Dei in Chile not just to blunt liberation theology advocates on the left. Neo-Pentecostal sects were wooing conservative Catholics who liked the scripture classes and felt a sense of mutual care in the emotional fervor of services. Catholic-style prosperity theology embraced orthodoxy, papal loyalty, and free-market capitalism. Wealth-as-virtue begat gifts to the church. The tradeoff was tolerance of Latin American political repression versus the Soviet Communist brand. Silva, who helped labor unions in the police state, made human rights an issue. Sodano, who supported Pinochet, pressed the Legion’s case. Silva capitulated. Later, a Jesuit asked him why. “Don’t talk to me about it, please,” Silva said ruefully.68

  Maciel put Father Raymond Cosgrave, an Irish Legionary, at Sodano’s disposal as a virtual aide-de-camp at the nunciature in Santiago. In 1989, on track to become secretary of state, Sodano took English classes in Dublin at a Legion school. He went on holiday at a Legion vacation home in Sorrento. Back in Rome, explains Favreau, “Sodano came over with his entire family, two hundred of them, for a big meal when he was named cardinal. And we fed them all. When Sodano became secretary of state there was another celebration. He’d come over for special events, like the groundbreaking for the Center for Higher Studies performed with a golden shovel. And a dinner after that.

  “Cardinal Sodano helped change the zoning requirements to build the university in Rome,” continues Favreau. Sodano’s brother, Alessandro, was a building engineer caught up in Italian corruption charges in the early 1990s.69 The cardinal’s nephew, Andrea, the building engineer and later vice president of the Follieri Group, did work on the Regina Apostolorum. Two Legionaries on the project thought Andrea’s work was inadequate. When they suggested to Maciel that the bill not be paid, he yelled, “You pay him and you pay him now!” They did.

  Maciel approved separate gifts of $10,000 and $5,000 to Cardinal Sodano, according to former Legionaries. These priests consider these funds the tip of the iceberg for Sodano. Sodano’s photograph hung in the Regnum Christi center in Rome, embroidering the cardinal’s persona as champion of a growing lay movement. Regnum Christi’s success was his success, too.

  Sodano declined my interview requests through the papal spokesman, Father Lombardi. Calls to Sodano’s residence were referred back to the Vatican.

  Maciel wanted Vatican approval for Regina Apostolorum as a Pontifical Academy, the highest level of recognition by the Vatican. This would put the freshly minted university on equal footing with the much older Lateran and Gregorian universities. So it was, in 1999, that the Legionaries offered a Mercedes-Benz to Cardinal Pio Laghi, then-prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education (and former papal ambassador to the United States). Laghi, who has since died, was appalled and spurned the offer, according to Father B, who witnessed his outrage. Laghi’s successor, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, refused to grant the academic status. Regina Apostolorum lacked credentials in research, faculty, and international prestige, according to a knowledgeable official. The Lateran University, which was established in 1773, had received pontifical standing in 1910. In denying Maciel his university’s distinction, Grocholewski bucked the powerful Sodano. But Grocholewski, a Pole who had come to Rome as a seminarian in the cold war and never left, was a former prefect of the Signatura, confident of his position and ties to John Paul.

  Sodano did Maciel a greater favor by pressuring Ratzinger to halt the canonical case in the CDF, as José Barba learned from his canon lawyer, Martha Wegan. Ratzinger, as archbishop of Munich and then as prefect of the CDF, had moved haltingly on other cases of sexual predators; the Vatican under John Paul had no uniform approach.70 His ideal of the priesthood as a chivalrous caste, resisting godless Communism, left him myopic, if not blind, to the cold truth of the 1990s as victims, lawyers, and journalists in English-speaking countries dug out evidence of appalling crimes in a clergy sexual underground.

  Sodano was Machiavellian, Ratzinger a moral absolutist. Sodano’s reputation stood to suffer if Maciel were punished. By Sodano’s lights, the Maciel record of supplying vocations outweighed accusations from the 1950s on which Rome had already ruled. Truth di
dn’t matter anyway. This was Sodano’s logic in pushing a Vatican silent front as they eased out Groër, the pederast cardinal of Vienna. But Ratzinger could not have tabled a case as grave as Maciel’s without the approval of John Paul. The pope is the pope; they had a standing Friday lunch. In what now seems face-saving, Ratzinger told a Mexican bishop that an investigation of Maciel might not be “prudent,” as he had attracted so many men to the priesthood.71 How tepid a rationale from the law-and-order prefect who had waged intellectual war against Leonardo Boff, Hans Küng, and Charles Curran: humiliate prolific theologians, but look the other way when it was time to condemn a pedophile?

  On a visit to Regina Apostolorum, Ratzinger refused a pay envelope after a lecture on theology. “Tough as nails in a very cordial way,” says Father A.

  Maciel maintained his power courtesy of a warped tribunal system. He continued traveling from Rome to Madrid, on to Latin America and North America, visiting Legion centers, meeting the donors. Father Stephen Fichter, today the pastor of Sacred Heart parish in Haworth, New Jersey, coordinated the Legion’s administrative office in Rome from February 1998 until October 2000. Fichter left the Legion for the diocesan clergy, earned a doctorate in sociology from Rutgers, and today is a New Jersey pastor and an associate at a Georgetown University research center. “When Father Maciel would leave Rome it was my duty to supply him with ten thousand dollars in cash—five thousand in American dollars, and the other half in the currency of the country to which he was traveling,” explains Fichter. “It was a routine part of my job. He was so totally above reproach that I felt honored to have that role. He did not submit any receipts and I would not have dared to ask him for a receipt … As Legionaries, our norms concerning the use of money were very restricted. If I went on an outing I was given twenty dollars and if I had a pizza I’d return the fifteen dollars to my superior with a receipt.”72