by Jason Berry
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.
The Cardinal grumbled a little about his predecessor in Colombia who had sold a house near the seminary and it would have been wonderful to have the seminarians nearby … The Cardinal told us who had donated the house and how a wealthy gentleman in Colombia had given the old bishop money … The Cardinal continued to tell us how when he was young he was “very tough” and sometimes he now felt sorry and ashamed for things he had done as a bishop.73
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:
&nb
sp; The answers that Fr. Maciel gives in the interview are profound and simple and have the frankness of one who lives his mission in the world and in the Church with his sights and his heart fixed on Christ Jesus. The key to this success is, without doubt, the attractive force of the love of Christ. This has always encouraged Fr. Maciel and his institute not to allow themselves to be conquered by controversy, which has not been lacking in their history.79
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?
103. Recruitment happens in stages, going successfully from kindness to friendship, from friendship to confidence, from confidence to conviction, from conviction to submission.
494. No one shall visit outsiders in their homes, deal with them frequently or speak with them by telephone without justifiable reasons or for apostolic purposes …
504.2. No one shall attend public spectacles or sporting events, even under the pretext of accompanying outside persons or groups, especially if such groups are mixed.
509. The center’s Director or Manager shall review all correspondence from members of the center and release that which he or she judges to be opportune.
514.1. Live your consecration with a sense of removal as it relates to dealings with your family and try to fundamentally channel this relationship into conquering them for Christ.
“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
decided—bearing in mind Fr. Maciel’s advanced age and his delicate health—to forgo a canonical hearing and to invite the father to a reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry. The Holy Father approved these decisions. Independently of the person of the Founder, the worthy apostolate of the Legionaries of Christ and of the Association “Regnum Christi” is gratefully recognized.84
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 t
hat 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.
