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:

“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:

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

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.”

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:

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.

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 Medina—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.

“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.”

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’Carroll, 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.)

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.

“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 didn’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

Besides Regina Apostolorum and the Center for Higher Studies, where Chris Kunze lived, Maciel built Mater Ecclesiae, a seminary in Rome for various dioceses; newly named bishops stayed there for training. Maciel grounded the Legion into the church infrastructure of Rome. Sitting at a 2000 celebrational lunch on the campus, Maciel saw Sodano, seated at another table, and snorted to a Legionary: “Este hombre no toma paso sin guarache” (This man does not make a move without having his feet covered; that is, getting something in return).

When Chris Kunze went to the Legion vacation house at Santa Maria de Termini near Sorrento, on the Mediterranean, for the 2000 summer break, his loneliness was acute. While there he met a young woman who was divorced with two children. As she confided about herself, his pastoral front softened; he spoke about his doubts. He kept his vow of celibacy, but in the emotional freedom realized that Legion life was eating at him like acid on the soul.

In the warm glow of an August evening he sat alone with Maciel in the house, both of them wearing Mexican guayaberas. He said he had to leave; he was simply not cut out for life in the priesthood. He wanted to go back to America. “You’re wrong,” replied Maciel. “You have an important position. You must follow God’s will.” But, said Kunze, his loneliness was not new, he’d struggled with it years ago in Germany. Maciel frowned. “If I’d known that I wouldn’t have recommended you for the Vatican, Father Christopher.” He doesn’t remember what I confided in letters from Germany, realized Kunze, because Legionary brothers ghostwrite his letters. How could he keep up with the deep personal details of so many men, so many letters? But I know he kept the letters …

Maciel jabbed a finger on the table. “If you don’t fulfill God’s will, you will go to hell!” Kunze told him chastity was a burden he could no longer bear.

Maciel sat back with arms folded, legs extended, a dripping scowl.

Soon, though, Legion superiors proposed that Father Christopher spend a sabbatical period of discernment in Cheshire, Connecticut. He agreed.

In September he accompanied Maciel on one of his walks around the campus the superior general took most days he was in Rome. Recalling pleasant experiences of his religious life, particularly the Vatican work, Kunze thanked him. Maciel glowered. “When you leave the Legion don’t you ever join league with the conspirators against me!” Never before had Kunze seen Maciel vulnerable. He realized the letters that he and others had sent, revealing innermost thoughts and sins, gave Maciel leverage should anyone criticize him.

The Vatican paid Kunze $8,000 in severance, which he kept for himself. He told his Clergy colleagues he was returning to America; his mother was ill.

With avuncular kindness, Cardinal Castrillón wished him well.

Maciel’s cynicism extended to using “espionage” against other officials. The respected Spanish journalist José Martínez de Velasco published a book based on internal documents given to him by a disgruntled Legionary who took files as he walked out of the Legion forever. Cardinals and bishops who attended the conferences and receptions at Regina Apostolorum had no idea seminarians were writing reports about them. Martínez de Velasco quotes a seminarian’s October 10, 2000, memo on Maciel’s friend Cardinal Castrillón. Legionary brothers “went to pick up the Cardinal for his conference. He proved amiable and open enough. Along the way he commented to us about his region of Colombia and the region where he had worked.” After greeting other bishops, Castrillón marveled at the beauty of the campus.

Another seminarian reports on Bishop Onésimo Cepeda of Ecatepec, Mexico, saying that calm had come to Chiapas (where Zapatista guerrillas captured three cities in 1994) and Bishop Samuel Ruiz “had ceased his propaganda.” The seminarian sneers at Ruiz as “a supporter of the rights of natives and liberation theology, and fighting against the Legionaries.” Ruiz, who preached nonviolence to Zapatista rebels, was beloved among the poor.⁷⁴

The seminarians’ sophomoric reports display a sycophancy in seeking favor with superiors. Portraying a bishop allied with the poor as a Legion enemy fits Maciel’s formula: the Legion on the right side, conspiracies on the other.

Glenn Favreau felt regret for the role he played in developing files on North American College seminarians in the early 1990s. Maciel told “specially chosen brothers” to befriend men “who were likely going to be officials in their dioceses one day, or even bishops,” says Favreau. Legionary brothers filled out reports to “the superiors on progress with each seminarian, about the potential we saw in each one. It was a well-organized system of espionage.” One seminarian in the files was a son of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.⁷⁵

As the 2002 abuse crisis intensified, Maciel exposed fault lines in the Vatican. From his First Things office, Neuhaus reacted to news coverage of the charges against Maciel in the CDF. (José Barba, incensed at four years’ delay, had broken the Vatican-requested silence.)⁷⁶ Neuhaus denounced “vicious gossip” and praised Maciel for “virile holiness of tenacious resolve that has been refined in the fires of frequent opposition and misunderstanding.” He continued: “A cardinal in whom I have unbounded confidence and who has been involved in the case tells me that the charges are ‘pure invention, without the slightest foundation.’ ” Neuhaus, now deceased, never revealed his source, but the cardinal “involved in the case” was probably Ratzinger, who had confronted nothing like it in his storied career. Neuhaus insulted Maciel’s victims: “After a scrupulous examination of the claims and counter-claims, I have arrived at moral certainty that the charges are false and malicious.”⁷⁷

As Neuhaus’s defense spread via Legion websites into translations for Spanish and Latin American supporters, Maciel became an albatross for Ratzinger who was, ironically, one of the few cardinals who didn’t take the money. When ABC reporter Brian Ross and a camera crew surprised Ratzinger outside a Vatican doorway and asked about Maciel, the cardinal slapped Ross’s wrist, fuming, “Come to me when the moment is given. Not yet!”⁷⁸ The footage was indelible.

The Legion disinformation strategy was fraying as more men left the order, connecting via the Internet with Genvieve Kineke, who saw Regnum Christi as a scam, and Paul Lennon, a family therapist in Alexandria, Virginia, who had left the Legion in 1984, not as a sexual victim, but in protest against Maciel’s domineering behavior. Lennon formed ReGAIN Network to post information and probe the cultlike dynamics. Maciel, age eighty-four, had his last hurrah at a 2004 banquet at the Waldorf Astoria, cohosted by Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill, raising $725,000 for Legion schools. Chatting with Carlos Slim, Maciel ran his fingers admiringly down the billionaire’s tuxedo lapel, as filmed by Televisa.

In summer 2004 Chris Kunze, three years out of the priesthood, attended a ReGAIN conference in Atlanta. He embraced Juan Vaca in common cause. Three years later in the Georgia capital, Jeb Bush spoke at a Legion–Regnum Christi conference. Among those present, Cardinal Franc Rodé, the Vatican prefect in charge of religious orders, was a champion of Regnum Christi. Rodé flew on to Cancun for a vacation on the Legion’s dime, according to Legion insiders.

Maciel scored another coup in 2003 when Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone of Genoa wrote an illustrious preface to Christ Is My Life, Nuestro Padre’s book-length interview with Jésus Colina. The book was Maciel’s self-defense against the pending CDF charges. Colina, a member of Regnum Christi, founded Zenit, the Legion-sponsored news agency. In the soft questions, Colina proved himself a willing dupe. So did Bertone, who had worked for Ratzinger in the CDF as a canon lawyer before his appointment in Genoa. In the Italian preface, Bertone wrote of Maciel:

Bertone would succeed Sodano as Pope Benedict’s secretary of state.

RATZINGER BREAKS RANKS

John Paul in his twilight showed a surreal dissociation from the abuse crisis. As the Irish scandals worsened, California bishops faced more than nine hundred civil lawsuits filed under a 2002 law that extended the statute of limitations in reaction to Law’s cover-up in Boston. The Vatican had no real plan. The CDF by then had seven hundred cases of priests whose bishops wanted them ousted. Ratzinger was slowly laicizing the worst offenders. But John Paul’s lavish praise of Maciel marked Sodano’s chessboard move against the CDF case. If the Holy Father extols him, how can Father Maciel be bad? On November 30, 2004, the pope gave the Legion administrative control of the Pontifical Institute Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center, an international conference center and hotel school. John Paul praised Regnum Christi for fostering a “civilization of Christian justice and love” and approved their statutes to Sodano’s smile. Did the ailing pontiff read what he endorsed?

“I think the only honest answer is that the pope and his senior aides obviously do not believe the charges,” John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican correspondent, wrote on December 3, 2004.⁸⁰ In a striking coincidence, Archbishop Harry Flynn of St. Paul, Minnesota, released a letter to his pastors that banned the Legion and Regnum Christi from the archdiocese and criticized Father Anthony Bannon as “vague and ambiguous” on the Legion’s agenda; Flynn saw Regnum Christi as “a parallel church.” That same week, Ratzinger broke ranks with Sodano and ordered an investigation of Maciel. With John Paul dying, Ratzinger knew that whoever the forthcoming conclave might elect should not enter the papacy saddled by the scandal of a sheltered Maciel. “Under a 2002 policy adopted by the U.S. hierarchy, an American priest facing allegations such as those made against Maciel would be suspended immediately while an investigation was conducted,” reported Gerald Renner for the Hartford Courant.⁸¹

And so, during the first week of December 2004, Maciel stepped down as the Legion’s superior general. The Legionaries elected Álvaro Corcuera, a forty-seven-year-old priest from Mexico City and a frequent visitor in the Apostolic Palace, courtesy of Bishop Dziwisz. A product of Legion schools, Corcuera was popular within the order, adulated Maciel, and was hardly prepared for what was to come.

The pope was too ill on Good Friday so Ratzinger led the Stations of the Cross in the Colosseum. His words shot across the media grid: “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Him.” As journalist Robert Blair Kaiser wrote, Ratzinger was “nailing down a campaign theme” in his pursuit of the papacy.⁸²

Born in Malta, Monsignor Charles Scicluna cut an unlikely figure as Ratzinger’s investigator. In his early forties, short, stout, with thinning black hair, cherubic cheeks, and tiny hands, the canonist cut an ironic counterimage to his title: promoter of justice. But Scicluna was tough. He had briefed American canonists on how to send their nightmare cases to the CDF. His punitive approach clashed with the clubby circles of clergy in Rome who saw priests’ rights under assault. Scicluna spoke English with a British accent; his Spanish bore traces of Italian, as Juan Vaca noticed when he gave his testimony at an Upper East Side church on April 2, 2005. Scicluna asked questions, a priest-secretary typed on a laptop, Vaca recounted the horrors of his past. During a break, they learned the news from Rome: John Paul had died.

Chris Kunze watched the solemn majesty of John Paul’s death from his home in Waco, Texas, in mourning for the pope he revered. Now married and the father of a toddler, Kunze had written John Paul about his encounters with Maciel. On the flight to Mexico City, where he would join Barba and others as witnesses, Kunze thought, I don’t want Father Maciel to go to hell. This is a chance for him to repent, do penance, to say he is sorry to victims who have waited decades. Imagine their suffering! Mine is nothing compared to what they went through.

Monsignor Scicluna took the testimony of more than twenty men in Mexico City. He returned to Rome with a satchel of books on Maciel published in Spanish and English, and videotapes of news investigations Barba had culled. The canonical prosecutor arrived in the Vatican where his boss had become the new pope. Barely a month into Benedict’s papacy, the Legionaries issued a May 20 news release disclosing that the “Holy See” had informed them that “there is no canonical process under way regarding our founder … nor will one be initiated.” The Vatican Press Office confirmed the statement. The Legion pronounced Maciel “exonerated,” just as other witnesses were arriving in Rome to testify before Scicluna. But the case-closed document, as John Allen reported, came not from Scicluna’s office, which had jurisdiction over the case, but from the office of Cardinal Sodano, in a fax bearing the Secretariat of State’s seal.⁸³ Then irony dealt Maciel a fateful hand. In 1995 he had nominated Bishop Rafael Guízar Valencia, his uncle, for sainthood. In 2006 the Congregation for the Causes of Saints gave its approval. The document for Guízar’s sainthood was on Benedict’s desk to sign as the pope mulled the contents of Scicluna’s report. For a Vatican-protected pederast to attend his uncle’s beatification would invite a media bloodbath. On May 18, 2006, the ruse ended with a terse Vatican communiqué. It said that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

As a cardinal, Ratzinger would have laicized an ordinary priest with so many victims. Sodano intervened again, according to a well-placed Vatican official, to soften the punishment and make sure the language praised RC and the Legion, despite the nine-year campaign attacking the victims. The Legion statement had no hint of apology: “Fr. Maciel, with the spirit of obedience to the church that has always characterized him, has accepted this communiqué with faith, complete serenity, and tranquility of conscience … Following the example of Christ, [he] decided not to defend himself.” Comparing a pedophile to Jesus was hubris more inflated than anything in the media circus of celebrities or politicians snared in sex scandals who apologize, pick themselves up, and keep getting airtime. As Maciel, age eighty-six, slouched out of Rome, the Legion took down its website attacks, though for months it maintained the biographical hosannas to the founder, having little else about the Legion to promote.

Money is a mighty force in any religion. The Legionaries had their script with Sodano’s fingerprints: Father Maciel was never tried, the Vatican never stated that he abused anyone. Banking on the illusion of things unsaid, the Legionaries unofficially told people that Maciel had been wrongly accused and would one day be vindicated. As part of its mop-up campaign, the Legion in 2007 sued ReGAIN Network and Paul Lennon for posting the private vows, the constitution, as allegedly stolen intellectual properties, and in a spectacular display of projection, accused the ex-Legionaries of “malicious disinformation.”⁸⁵ The nuisance suit threw ReGAIN into a fund-raising scramble. Although the constitution still circulated on the Internet, Lennon gave a copy to Legion lawyers and, in order to settle the case, halted the discussion board, the real target of the lawsuit, as it drew ex-supporters, with fresh facts, like steel filings to a magnet. In Rome, Benedict XVI ordered the Legion to abolish the private vows.

Elizabeth Kunze was in her thirteenth year as a Regnum Christi consecrated woman, teaching in Ireland, when Maciel’s health gave out in late January 2008, in Florida. Legionaries took him to a hospital in Miami. A report in Madrid’s El Mundo by Idoia Sota and José M. Vidal reconstructs his final days. Father Corcuera, Maciel’s successor as superior general, gathered in the hospital with several other Legionaries. They wanted Nuestro Padre to make a final confession in keeping with the Catholic faith. He refused so emotionally that one priest reportedly summoned an exorcist, but no ritual took place.

Amid the black emotions of his ebbing life, the women appeared: Norma Hilda Baños and the daughter she had had with Maciel, twenty-three-year-old Normita. “I want to stay with them,” said Maciel. According to the account in El Mundo:

The priests got Maciel to a Legion house in Jacksonville, Florida; he reportedly grew belligerent when Corcuera tried to anoint him, yelling, “I said no!” According to the reporters, he “did not believe in God’s pardon,” an opinion to which his biographical facts lend large support, but for which, in truth, we have no proof. What mattered to the Legion as he died was sealing the history known to insiders of his financial arrangements for Norma Hilda, with whom he had begun a common-law relationship in Acapulco in about 1980, and their child, Normita. Later on he moved them to Madrid and provided financial security.

Upon his death, the Legion said that he went to heaven.

In Cuernavaca, Mexico, Maciel’s three sons saw the news of his death on TV with their mother, Blanca Lara Gutiérrez, whom he had met and wooed in 1977, when she was nineteen and he, at fifty-seven, told her he was an agent for the CIA. He had been out of touch with that family for several years.