In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  ‘John Paul II put democratic pressure on Pinochet, and that paid off. A year after the pope’s visit, a referendum opened the way to the democratic transition,’ according to Luis Larrain, the chairman of an important LGBT association in Chile, whose father was a minister under the dictator.

  Which leaves the strange role of Pinochet’s political police with regard to Sodano.

  ‘If we put ourselves in the context of the 1980s, Pinochet considered his diplomatic relations with the Vatican to be crucial. It was normal for Sodano to be hailed in public by the presidential couple, and “processed” in private by the Chilean secret services. What’s stranger is the abnormal relationship that he formed, the intimate connections that he had with the dictator’s agents and advisers, among the most senior-ranking in the regime,’ says a Chilean journalist who wrote a great deal about the crimes of the dictatorship.

  No fewer than four of Pinochet’s officials ‘processed’ Sodano in person. First of all, Captain Sergió Rillón, a close adviser to the dictator and his ‘liaison’ agent for religious affairs, who had an office on the first floor of La Moneda, the presidential palace.

  ‘He was a man of the far right and even a “national socialist”. He was one of Pinochet’s gurus and he represented the hard wing,’ I was told by the journalist Alejandra Matus in Santiago.

  He was known to be very close to Karadima and Sodano:

  ‘Rillón was a very intimate member of Pinochet’s most intimate circle. And he was a very intimate member of Sodano’s intimate circle,’ Santiago Schuler tells me.

  Then comes Osvaldo Rivera, a worldly self-proclaimed cultural expert working for Pinochet, who also had his entrées to the upper floors of La Moneda.

  ‘Rivera presented himself as a “cultural tzar”. But he was the one most responsible for censoring television for Pinochet. We all knew that he was moving in a milieu that was both far right and gay,’ observes Pablo Simonetti.

  Questioned today, Osvaldo Rivera remembers Angelo Sodano very clearly. He is even loquacious on the subject. Rivera expands on Sodano’s life in Chile and gives us plenty of information about his life. He recalls him ‘drinking whisky, surrounded by rich and lecherous friends’, then going home under a close guard because he was ‘quite drunk’.

  Finally, Sodano was also close to Francisco Javier Cuadra, Pinochet’s handyman, his spokesman, future minister and ambassador in the Vatican. He too, divorced and a father of eight, is portrayed in a novel as having led a colourful life.

  Apart from Pinochet’s men whom Angelo Sodano associated with regularly, two other unsettling characters deserve a mention here, because they also gravitated around the dictator and belonged to the same ‘mafia’. The first, an extravagant if closeted homosexual, Arancibia Clavel, was close to the dictator and the army, being responsible for operations involving the physical elimination of political opponents; he received a heavy sentence for his crimes before being murdered by a ‘taxi boy’. The second, Jaime Guzman, was one of the theorists of the Pinochet regime: this rigid ultra Catholic law professor was named in a DINA portfolio under the label ‘homosexualismo’, according to Óscar Contardo in his book Raro, Una historia gay de Chile; he was murdered in 1991 by the far left. Both men knew Sodano.

  The homosexual network of Pinochet has never been described – it will be a revelation for many Chileans. Researchers and journalists are currently investigating this paradoxical milieu and the financial arrangements between Pinochet and the Vatican (particularly via special funds in secret bank accounts that the dictator had at the Riggs Bank, and that might possibly have funded anti-communist offices close to Solidarność in Poland): we may expect further revelations on all these points in the years to come.

  In all of these cases, the political and sexual collusions give meaning to a famous phrase attributed to Oscar Wilde and repeated in House of Cards: ‘Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.’ It remains for us to understand why the apostolic nuncio Angelo Sodano took such pleasure in associating with the homosexual milieu. Why did he move in this group at the very moment when John Paul II was declaring homosexuality to be an abominable sin and an absolute evil?

  In conclusion we may put forward three hypotheses. The first is to think that Angelo Sodano was manipulated by the Chilean secret services, was spied on and his nunciature infiltrated by virtue of his naiveté, his inexperience and his associations. The second would suggest that Angelo Sodano was vulnerable – for example, if he was himself homosexual – and was obliged to compromise with the regime to protect his secret. It is clear Pinochet’s political police knew all the details of his professional and private life, whatever they might have been: perhaps they even blackmailed him? The third hypothesis is to assume that Angelo Sodano, that great manipulator, who shared the political ideas of Pinochet’s advisers as well as their morals, moved freely in a milieu that suited him to the ground.

  10

  The Legion of Christ

  Marcel Maciel is probably the most diabolical figure that the Catholic Church has given birth to and raised over the last 50 years. Possessing insane levels of wealth and overseeing a sustained programme of sexual violence, he was protected over several decades by John Paul II, Stanisław Dziwisz, personal secretary to the pope, and Angelo Sodano, the cardinal secretary of state, who became ‘prime minister’ of the Vatican.

  All of the people I have interviewed in Mexico, Spain and Rome are puzzled about the support that Marcial Maciel has enjoyed from Rome, with the rare exception of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the pope’s ‘minister of the interior’ at the time, who told me during one of our discussions in his private apartment at the Vatican: ‘John Paul II met Marcial Maciel during his trip to Mexico in 1979. It was the first international trip by the new pope, just after his election. John Paul II had a positive image of him. The Legion of Christ was recruiting huge numbers of new seminarians; it was a very efficient organization. But the truth about the paedophilia is that we didn’t know. We started having doubts, hearing rumours, only at the end of the pontificate of John Paul II.’

  For his part, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, ‘minister’ of foreign affairs under John Paul II, also told me during four discussions at his office on Via Della Conciliazione: ‘We didn’t know about Marcial Maciel. We didn’t know about all that. It’s an extreme case. It’s a truly unimaginable level of schizophrenia.’

  Marciel Maciel Degollado was born in 1920 in Cotija de la Paz, in the state of Michoacán in western Mexico. He was ordained as a priest by his uncle in 1944, about the time he founded the Legion of Christ, a Catholic education charity.

  This far-from-typical branch of the Mexican Church in the service of Jesus was initially treated with suspicion, both in Mexico and in the Vatican, because of its almost sectarian nature. However, within a few years, thanks to his unusually high levels of energy – though, even at this early stage, with uncertain finances – Marcial Maciel found himself at the head of countless schools, universities and charities in Mexico. In 1959 he founded Regnum Christi, the secular branch of the Legion of Christ. Several journalists (an Italian, Franca Giansoldati, a Mexican, Carmen Aristegui, and two Americans, Jason Berry and Gerald Renner) told the story of the spectacular rise and fall of Marcial Maciel; here I will pick up the broad lines from these inquiries, also drawing on dozens of interviews of my own that I undertook for this investigation during four trips to Mexico.

  At the head of his ‘army’, whose loyalty to the pope was elevated to the level of a mantra and fanatical devotion to him as an individual, the priest Maciel recruited thousands of seminarians and harvested funds in the tens of millions, turning his system into a model of Catholic fundraising and new evangelization in line with the dreams of Paul VI and, particularly, of John Paul II.

  Here we might borrow an image from the Gospel according to Saint Luke, about a person possessed by a devil, who replies to Christ when asked his name: ‘My name is Legion, because we are many (demons
).’ Was Marcial Maciel thinking of that image when he created his demonic army?

  Either way, the Mexican priest enjoyed impressive success. He was able to rely on a rigid and fanatical organization in which seminarians took a vow of chastity but also one of poverty (giving their goods, their possessions and even the money they were given for Christmas to the Legion of Christ). To that, Marciel added a commitment contrary to canon law: the ‘vow of silence’. It was strictly forbidden to criticize one’s superiors, particularly Father Maciel, whom the seminarians had to call ‘nuestro padre’. Even before it became a machine for sexual harassment, the Legion was an enterprise of moral harassment.

  Obedience to Father Maciel was a form of sadomasochism that remains unthinkable, even before the sexual abuse. They were all willing to bend over backwards to be loved by their father, without imagining the cost.

  To control his short-haired young recruits, who processed two by two – in shorts in the summer, in the winter in a double-breasted coat with double buttons and a stiff collar – the guru put in place a formidable system of internal surveillance. Their correspondence was read, their phone-calls listed, their friendships picked over. The cleverest, the most handsome, the athletes, formed the inner circle around Marcial Maciel, who loved surrounding himself with young seminarians. Their beauty was an advantage; indigenous features a handicap. It you played a nice musical instrument, that was a very much appreciated plus; if you were sickly, like the young country priest in the novel by Bernanos, that was a flaw.

  Basically, physique took precedence over intellect. This was summed up for me in a fine phrase by James Alison, an English priest who spent a long time living in Mexico, and whom I interviewed in Madrid: ‘The Legion of Christ are Opus Dei who don’t read books.’

  The double life of the legionnaire in chief was denounced very early, contrary to what the Vatican has claimed. In the 1940s, Marcial Maciel was dismissed twice from the seminary by his superiors for troubling events relating to sexuality. The first instances of sexual abuse date back to the 1940s and 1950s, and were officially signalled to the Mexican bishops and cardinals at that time. Notifications of Marcial Maciel’s severe substance addiction, a dependency that accompanied his sessions of sexual abuse, also made it as far as Rome. In 1956, Maciel was suspended by the Vatican on the orders of Cardinal Valerio Valeri – evidence, if any were needed, that the file was well known from the 1950s onwards.

  However, as had happened on several occasions during the career of this brilliant liar and forger, Marcial Maciel managed to have himself pardoned: his slate was wiped clean by Cardinal Clemente Micara late in 1958. In 1965, Pope Paul VI even officially recognized the Legion of Christ in a decree linking them directly to the holy see. In 1983, John Paul II would relegitimize Marcial Maciel’s sect by validating the constitutional charter of the Legion, even though it seriously contravened canon law.

  It should be added that, by now, the Legion of Christ had become an impressive war machine that won praise and compliments all over the place – while troubling rumours about its founder intensified. Marcial Maciel was, at this point, at the head of an empire that would, by the end of his career, include 15 universities, 50 seminaries and institutes of higher education, 177 middle schools, 34 schools for disadvantaged children, 125 religious houses, 200 educational centres and 1,200 oratories and chapels, not to mention charitable associations. Everywhere, the banner of the Legion floated on the wind and displayed its blazons.

  Found innocent and relegitimized by Paul VI and John Paul II, Father Marcial Maciel ramped up his energy to develop his movement and, perversely, to assuage his hunger as a predatory priest. On the one hand, the comprachicos – a slang term used for people who traffic in stolen children – established privileged relations with the extremely wealthy, such as Carlos Slim, the king of Mexican telecommunication, whose wedding he celebrated, and made him one of the philanthropists for his Legion. It is estimated that, through his holdings and foundations, Marcial Maciel amassed a fortune of a dozen properties in Mexico, Spain and Rome, as well as liquid assets placed in secret accounts valued at several hundred million dollars (according to the New York Times). Money was obviously one of the keys to the Maciel system.

  On the other hand, taking advantage of exchanges made during confession, and the files he had on many young seminarians, he blackmailed those who had been identified as engaging in homosexual conduct, and abused them with impunity. All in all, the predator Maciel is said to have sexually abused dozens of children and countless seminarians: more than two hundred victims have been identified to date.

  His way of life was also highly unusual for the times – and for a priest. This father – who showed absolute humility in public, and great modesty on all occasions – lived privately in an armoured apartment, stayed in luxury hotels on his foreign travels and drove incredibly expensive sports cars. He also had false identities, kept two women by whom he would have at least six children, and had no hesitation in abusing his own sons, two of whom have since registered complaints against him.

  In Rome, where he went often in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he was welcomed as a humble servant of the Church by Paul VI and as a guest star by his ‘personal friend’ John Paul II.

  It was not until 1997 that a new credible and well-founded complaint reached the pope’s office. It was made by seven priests, former seminarians of the Legion, who said they had been sexually abused by Maciel. They made their complaint under the seal of the gospel and received the support of well-known academics. The letter was filed under ‘no further action’ by secretary of state Angelo Sodano and the pope’s private secretary Stanisław Dziwisz. Did they pass it on to the pope? We don’t know.

  No surprise there: as we have seen, Angelo Sodano’s approach was to always defend priests, even if they were suspected of sexual abuse. This was his view, as if he were repeating the famous Latin quote in the Raphael’s Stanzas, which I saw in the apostolic palace: ‘Dei Non Hominum Est Episcopos Iudicare’ (It is for God, not men, to judge bishops). But the cardinal went further, and during an Easter celebration he publicly denounced accusations of paedophilia as ‘the latest gossip’. Later, he would be challenged, violently and by name, by another cardinal, the courageous and friendly Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, for covering up the sexual crimes of his predecessor, Cardinal Hans Hermann Gröer. A homosexual, Gröer was forced to resign after a noisy scandal in Austria.

  ‘Cardinal Angelo Sodano’s rule was never to abandon a priest, even when he was accused of the worst. He never deviated from that line. I think that, for him, it was a matter of avoiding divisions in the Church, and never allowing its enemies to damage it. Retrospectively, we can see this as an error, but Cardinal Sodano was a man born in the 1920s, a different age. In the case of Marcial Maciel, it is clear that this was a severe error, but it followed the same logic,’ I was told by a retired archbishop who knows the cardinal well.

  The fact remains that the secretary of state Angelo Sodano was not content to be merely one of Marcial Maciel’s advocates to the holy father: he was also, as nuncio and then head of the Vatican’s diplomatic service, the chief ‘developer’ of the Legion of Christ in Latin America. The organization had no presence in Chile before Sodano’s arrival; he developed contacts with Maciel and encouraged the establishment of his movement in that country, then in Argentina, and perhaps subsequently in Colombia.

  Sol Prieto, an Argentinian academic and a specialist in Catholicism, whom I interviewed in Buenos Aires, tried to explain the cardinal’s rational motivations. ‘The whole of Angelo Sodano’s logic lay in weakening the traditional religious orders, such as the Jesuits, the Dominicans, the Benedictines and the Franciscans, whom he suspected of being on the left. He preferred the lay movements or conservative congregations like Opus Dei, Communion & Liberation, the Order of the Incarnate Word or the Legion of Christ. For him, the Church was at war and it needed soldiers, not just monks!’

  Soon, new accusations
of paedophilia were passed on to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, which was run at the time by Cardinal Ratzinger. New rapes were reported in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and over time these came to appear not just as a series of isolated acts but as a genuine system of evil. In 1997, a complete file was opened, and the Vatican realized it had to put an end to the predator’s wicked actions. In 2003, Marcial Maciel’s private secretary informed the Vatican in person of the criminal behaviour of his superior, coming to Rome with evidence that he passed to John Paul II, Stanislaw Dziwisz and Angelo Sodano, who refused to listen to him (this point is confirmed by a note to Pope Benedict XVI revealed by the journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi).

  These new charges led nowhere and were once again stamped ‘no further action’. Cardinal Ratzinger did not launch a procedure of any kind. According to Federico Lombardi, Benedict XVI’s former spokesman, the cardinal repeatedly informed Pope John Paul II of the crimes of Marcial Maciel, proposing that he be dismissed from his duties and reduced to the status of layman, but he is said to have met with a categorical refusal from Sodano or from Dziwisz.

  It seems, nevertheless, that Cardinal Ratzinger took the affair seriously enough to persevere; in spite of John Paul II’s obstinate position. He opened a new file on Maciel and built up a collection of evidence against him. But he was prudent man, too much so, in fact: he only moved when the lights were green. And as he tried to go into action beside John Paul II, he was forced to recognize that the lights were always red: the pope categorically refused to have his ‘friend’ Marcial Maciel disturbed.

  To give an idea of the prevailing state of mind at this time, we might recall that Ratzinger’s deputy, Tarcisio Bertone, the future secretary of state to Benedict XVI, signed – as late as 2003 – the preface to a book by Marcial Maciel, My Life is Christ (the Spanish journalist who interviewed Maciel for that book, Jesús Colina, would later admit that he had been manipulated by Maciel). At the same time, the Osservatore Romano published an article praising Maciel, an illustration of vice masquerading as virtue.