Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  When I interviewed him in November 2004, just a few months before the conclave in which he was elected Pope, the then Cardinal Ratzinger said: “It is increasingly apparent that a worldwide Church, particularly in this present situation, cannot be governed by an absolute monarch … in time a means will be found to create realistically a profound collaboration between the bishops and the Pope, because only in this way will we be able to respond to the challenges of this world.”

  Benedict XVI has done nothing to realize this principle.9

  Perhaps the idea of deeper collaboration convinced Benedict to invite the ultraorthodox Society of St. Pius X—a sect excommunicated by John Paul—back into the fold. The groundwork by Cardinal Castrillón collapsed when one of the society’s bishops gave a television interview in Sweden denying the existence of the Holocaust. More embarrassment, another papal apology.

  CHARISM IN THE COUNTING HOUSE

  Sodano had practical reasons for putting the Holy See’s credibility behind the Legionaries. His own reputation was on the line. The cardinal’s photograph hung in the halls of the Regina Apostolorum campus and Rome’s Regnum Christi center. The Legion had cultivated support from major figures in the Curia through the dispersal of Mass stipends that ranged from $2,500 up to several times that amount depending on the ceremonial importance. With Maciel exiled in Cotija, Legion seminarians drove around Rome delivering the 2006 Christmas baskets laden with fine wine and thousand-dollar Spanish hams for Curial supporters. Maciel was gone but his operation was part of the Vatican infrastructure—a large, troubled asset in the very literal sense.

  To sustain its $650 million budget, the Legion had a sophisticated fund-raising operation in Hamden, Connecticut, which at its peak in 2005 employed a hundred professionals. “If an employee became ill they’d go out of their way to help,” Fredrik Akerblom, a former fund-raiser, told me. “If someone had cancer, they’d keep him on payroll and do everything to help. That was one aspect I respected and liked. But they didn’t provide health care for the [Legion] brothers. There was a lot of internal discussion about their culture of young men bearing it out for Christ, and using that to make the families pay for the insurance.”

  Mary Kunze—Chris Kunze’s mother and a hospital bioethicist in Elm Grove, Wisconsin—reflected on her daughter, who in 2010 was living in a Regnum Christi community in Dublin, after fifteen years as a consecrated woman. “I speak to Elizabeth at least once a month,” Mrs. Kunze told me. “The last time, I asked if she’d had a pap smear or mammogram. She never has. In her last physical, she didn’t have blood work or urine analysis. They neglect the quiet little people like my daughter. She’s not getting any money, can’t come home unless we send money, and is not even getting basic medical care. She’s forty-five, at an age where women need these baseline tests. They have no health insurance. And it’s such a wealthy order! She says she’s happy and feels she’s doing God’s work, but I really doubt it; the brainwashing is so deep. These women don’t ask for things they need. They feel by asking they are selfish. They don’t have the basic human rights. I wish Benedict would really go in and clean it up.”

  “For the most part, Legionaries and consecrated are self-insured by the Legion,” the order’s lay spokesman Jim Fair told me. “Most do not have actual insurance, but we simply pay for care.”

  Roberta Garza, the youngest sibling of Father Luis Garza, the Legion vicar general, said that when her sister in Regnum Christi returned to Mexico from Rome “every couple of years, they would count on us to pay for her medical treatments, and they were not small. I remember she had her spleen removed and another time all her teeth repaired, and I’m not talking just a small filling. She seemed to not have any regular checkups or any preventive treatment whatsoever while under the Legion’s care, and she would come home in order to have her long overdue medical needs paid for by her family.”

  Akerblom had been a Regnum Christi member in Connecticut before returning to his native Sweden. “Over time,” he explained, “I realized that our donors interpreted anything critical of the Legion as an attack on their faith. The Legion had a brilliant way of dealing with those criticisms: we never speak ill of anyone who criticizes us. Donors felt the liberal establishment was hounding them. The Legionaries created the idea that they were under siege, that anything negative about them was an expression of that fallen world.

  “We sent out millions of fund-raising letters, literally millions,” Akerblom told me. “The appeal was young men in cassocks. That conveyed something deep to people, a hope that what they perhaps had grown up with and what had almost disappeared from the church was coming back: young men well groomed, orthodox in their beliefs, conservative in their views. We raised a lot of money. My personal concern when I worked there was that we frankly did not know what happened with money after it left the fund-raising office.”

  The fund-raising staff in Hamden worked the phones, direct-mail appeals, and personal contacts with donors, refining a database with help from Regnum Christi members to cultivate wealthy supporters.

  Another source shared a 2005 Legion study of its database.

  This study defined “a critical gift [as] a single, lump-sum cash gift of $10,000 or more.” Between 2002 and 2004 (while Maciel’s case lay dormant at Ratzinger’s tribunal), the study scrutinized 295 Major Donors—as they are called—in that $10,000-and-up category. Direct mail accounted for 48 percent of the contributions.

  To understand the critical path these Direct Mail donors followed, 137 dossiers outlining their cultivation history were compiled and reviewed …

  Nearly 70% (95 out of 137) of the donors surveyed met with a Legionary priest or brother and in 80 out of 137 (58%) a positive critical incident—that is, an event which made a difference in the way the donor thought about the Legion—could be identified from the notes and actions in the donor’s record …

  However, only in the Major Donors program do donors with identifiable critical incidents outperform donors without them, suggesting that critical incidents—and the intimate interpersonal relationships which often produce them—are more important at the major giving level.

  In analyzing “critical incidents,” the study explains:

  When donors connect with the Legion at its core—either through spiritual direction from a Legionary priest, or by incorporation into Regnum Christi—they respond generously. In the words of [Episcopal] Bishop Alfred Stanway: “Money follows ministry.”

  In our case, money follows charism.10

  Charism, according to Cardinal Avery Dulles, the late Jesuit theologian, is “a gift of grace, conferred not for one’s personal sanctification but for the benefit of others.”11 Charism in a religious order means the defining trait or vision, its unique character. Dominicans are educators known for preaching; Franciscans for commitment to the poor; Jesuits stress analytical thinking, scholarship, and service as “men for others.”

  Legion donors, according to the fund-raising study, “respond to that which makes the Legion different from Opus Dei, the Red Cross, or Notre Dame: the apostolic mission and spiritual formation of priests and lay men and women established by Father Maciel.”

  The Legion distributed a spiritual guide by Maciel, Psalter of My Days. After his death the order revealed he had plagiarized from The Psalter of My Hours by Luis Lucia, a Christian Democrat in Spain who wrote the work while imprisoned in the 1930s. Lucia died in Valencia in 1943. A Spanish Legionary told Catholic News Agency that Maciel’s text reproduced “eighty percent of the original book in content and style”12—meaning, he stole it.

  Maciel’s charism was fund-raising.

  The Legion fund-raising report lists seven individuals in descending order of their donations. Listed next to each name is a “Lifetime cash value” and a “critical incident.” The highest donor had a $10,686,341 lifetime cash value. The critical incident came at the Legion retreat center in Thornwood, New York—“very strong experience … spiritual direction with” two Legionaries i
dentified by initials. “Wants to get active with the LC,” the note concludes.

  The second-highest donor gave $1,043,629 and “had a critical incident in getting involved” as “director couple for Familia.”

  Familia was a ministry to families that the Legion wrested away from the founders, Paul and Libbie Sellors. The couple hired counsel and received an out-of-court settlement.13 Information on this went to Monsignor Scicluna at the Vatican.

  The third-highest donor, at $308,435, had a “meeting with LC priest and brother; daughters incorporated into [a youth program] by Fr. Maciel.”

  Of the fourth-highest donor, at $204,772, the report states: “Incorporated into RC indicates integration, death of husband freed up money.”

  And so on, down to the tenth major donor, at $145,052, next to whom the Critical Incident reads: “Incorporation into RC”—meaning Regnum Christi, signaling that the deal is closed.

  The Vatican communiqué that ousted Maciel gave Legion leaders time to regroup and work with Vatican officials. The Legion, through its news service Zenit, released occasional notices of Father Álvaro Corcuera, the superior general, meeting with Benedict. Picture the pope’s predicament. As with the Society of St. Pius X, he confronted a group that was beyond orthodoxy, and in this case trained in obedience to a sociopath. The Legion was moral relativism at the outer edge: the spiritual formation of the priests and seminarians, who took private vows never to speak ill of Maciel, was subjugated to his mental tyranny. Praising and defending Maciel shaped the Legion ethos. As Ratzinger’s closest canon law adviser, Scicluna had ample evidence for a shutdown, which would have sent a major signal to the media of a pope committed to reform. Why did he hold back? The new pope had two options; neither one was simple.

  Ending the Legion required a plan for retraining the priests, seminarians, and RC members with therapy and pastoral counseling—no easy job. That was the route for a moral absolutist. As Camus wrote, “Super human is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.”14

  Or, was it preferable to show flexibility, take the route of moral relativism, be patient with the behavior of Legionaries who carried a personal history of warped training, bring the order under Vatican control, get a grasp of its finances, and postpone a decision on the “name brand,” its public identity?

  For Benedict, the 2006 decision marked a confrontation between the moral absolutist and flexible governance over a corrupt religious group. The pope under Sodano’s influence chose to salvage the group, now that its founder was in exile. The Legion immediately showed its schizophrenia by pledging fealty to Benedict while announcing that Maciel felt “tranquility of conscience,” and, like Jesus, had chosen not to defend himself. The Legion launched into a campaign of internal marketing to assure its followers that Maciel had never been tried. Ergo, he was not guilty.

  “One thing that always struck me about the Legion is how they constantly had to justify themselves,” says the attorney Glenn Favreau, recalling his thirteen years in the order. “They defined themselves in opposition to others—critics of Maciel, enemies of the Legion. Take away Maciel, what were they?”

  The Vatican’s containment strategy of 2006 collapsed in 2009 when the Legion revealed to its followers that Maciel had a grown daughter out of wedlock. Corcuera, the superior general, long afflicted with migraine headaches and insomnia, had gone to the various religious houses, breaking the painful news. How long had he, and the austere Luis Garza as chief financial officer, known how money donated to the Legion was channeled to the support of Maciel’s shadow family in Madrid? When did Corcuera tell Benedict? Certain Legion advocates issued apologies for having defended him in the past. “Surprising, difficult to understand, and inappropriate for a Catholic priest,” offered a Legion spokesman in mild under-statement.15 Several prominent Legion priests left the order.

  And so, in 2009, the Vatican authorized an investigation of the entire religious order, a move unprecedented in modern church history.

  The Legion’s identity dilemma became a tar baby for the Vatican, a sticky creature spawned in the thickets of mendacity that would vex church officials and Pope Benedict amid the abuse scandals of 2010.

  As those events registered in Italy as never before, the Holy See faced a U.S. lawsuit brought in Oregon by the victim of a priest who had been moved from Ireland to America.16 When an Oregon appeals court refused to dismiss the case, which accused the Vatican of complicity, the lead attorney, Jeff Anderson, gained a foothold he had sought for years. Before the year was out, Jeff Anderson and Pope Benedict would stand at distant poles of the scandal, in an exquisite irony, each seeking justice for Maciel’s victims.

  CHAPTER 12

  ANOTHER CALIFORNIA

  The energy that burned through him began before dawn on a blend of liquefied fruit with eighteen powdered vitamins—“the mush,” his three young sons called it. The life force that sent him hurtling into each day sometimes ran fourteen hours at a stretch. The years of meeting clients, their lives still raw long after the early trauma, taught him how predators buried the evidence in their victims’ psyches.1 The adult survivor yearned to reach back in time and protect the child victim. Jeff Anderson spent heavily on investigations to find perpetrators; most were never prosecuted, too much time had passed. He alerted cops anyway. Hammering out settlements on the civil cases that took, on average, three years to resolve, he routinely blasted bishops in announcing new cases via Web-streamed video from his office (originally a bank built by a timber baron) in downtown St. Paul. Talking strategy with his co-counsels in other states, he carried a mental map of the many cases, working the cell phone on the forty-minute drive back to Stillwater, where he lived in a Victorian mansion above the St. Croix River. Street jogs after dinner softened the manic edge as he crawled into bed for five hours’ sleep.

  A wiry five foot four inches, Jeff Anderson had receding silver-blond hair and a perpetual tan to soften his rutted brow. The Cheshire cat grin hinted at a natural ebullience that made an easy slide to flamboyance. “All roads lead to Rome,” he told the Washington Post on April 19, 2010. “We’re chasing them. We’re taking bites out of their ass.”2 Three days later he filed a motion in federal court to put Benedict XVI under oath.3 A Wisconsin priest named in several cases had molested two hundred deaf students over many years; Cardinal Ratzinger had refused to defrock him after extensive correspondence with Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee. Anderson and his associate Mike Finnegan obtained the correspondence in discovery and gave copies to reporter Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times. The Times report raised hard questions about the pope’s judgment while a cardinal, and embarrassed the Vatican.4

  “It all leads to the pope,” Anderson insisted to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Deposing [the pope] sounds bombastic, but it isn’t. He needs to be held responsible for the torture and mutilation of children’s souls worldwide.”5

  Torture, mutilation—inflammatory rhetoric, words that made him good copy for journalists. But he had absorbed too much factual tonnage on sex criminals whose white collars had given them a free ride to maintain a calm demeanor. Anderson had been suing the church since 1984, losing almost as many cases as he had won, picking himself up each time, coiled to fight again. In Wisconsin he had been forced to hire his own attorney when church lawyers filed punitive motions in Madison. The perpetrator was defrocked, but the abuse, legally, lay too far in the past. Defending himself had cost $40,000. A 1995 Wisconsin state high court decision had barred abuse lawsuits against the church. In time, Anderson found a way around the statute: he began suing Wisconsin bishops for fraud, on the grounds that passing off pedophiles as good priests was itself a tort—an approach that got him a foot in the door.

  By spring 2003 he had about 150 clients. Over the previous twenty years he had settled claims for some five hundred victim-survivors for $60 million. He had won several high-profile trials that resulted in multimillion-dollar verdicts. Anderson was ecumenical in his way;
he took cases against Protestant ministers, Hare Krishnas, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons, but, by far, most of his clients were Catholic victims. His take of each successful case was 40 percent, plus expenses, proportionally shared with his law partners, until 2002, when he split off from his longtime firm. By 2003 the larger cases were settling for high six figures and up.

  “It was never really about the money for Jeff,” his wife, Julie, a willowy blonde who had done heavy lifting in the department of patience, said in 2003. “He liked to play the scrappy little lawyer, a down-and-dirty sort … He was an actor on a stage. And he was very good at commanding an audience.”6

  Anderson was a major benefactor of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an activist group that pushed the bishops, week after week, to disclose the names of perpetrators. SNAP disseminated leaflets outside churches, naming names, attacking negligent bishops. Media coverage expanded the self-help network. SNAP included parents who had lost children to suicide, ex-cops, a cabdriver, a university professor of English, an office secretary, twin brothers each with a master’s degree from Harvard, a portrait painter, computer programmers, real estate agents, a nurse, a subway train driver, an accountant, a physician, teachers, stay-at-home moms, firefighters, several priests, nuns, and recovering addicts or alcoholics of many stripes. SNAP had nine thousand members in 2010. Other plaintiff attorneys donated to SNAP, which relied on donations from victims who received settlements, too. SNAP had a budget exceeding $900,000 in 2006. By 2009 it had fallen to $420,000 against expenses of $490,000. Critics said SNAP should disclose its contributors’ list; many survivors wanted privacy, countered the founder, Barbara Blaine.7