From potential saints to profligates and downright disgraces to the Church: I must make up for failing to call attention earlier to a major post-script to the entire Marcial Maciel case written by American journalist Jason Berry, who almost singlehandedly kept the case alive for the Anglophone world in the past decade. Most of you will have read it by now from National Catholic Reporter online
ncronline.org/news/vatican/legion-christ-and-vatican-meltdown which published it on June 21.
To those who have not seen it yet, it's very long, and rather meandering, so I won't re-post it here because, after all, NCRep is good about keeping its online archives intact. If you have not already been disgusted by what you have read till now about Maciel and his criminally servile 'acolytes' - who are still being kept on, almost unpardonably, by papal legate Cardinal De Paolis in their leadership positions at the Legionaries of Christ - you will have more than enough cause to be, learning about their systematic deception to keep Maciel's myth intact even after the CDF had penalized him in 2006.
The unspeakable Fr. Maciel:
Post-mortem post-scripts
Abstracted from an article
by JASON BERRY
June 21, 2012
- Berry's new revelations start out from what Gianluigi Nuzzi publishes in his book regarding notations made by Mons. Georg Gaenswein about a meeting he had with a priest, Fr. Moreno, who had been Maciel's private secretary for 18 years and served also as his valet. Gaenswein's notes say "In 2003, [Moreno] insisted on informing GP II -- but the latter would not stand to listen to him and did not believe him", and that Moreno then "wanted to inform Cardinal [Angelo] Sodano [then Vatican secretary of state] but he did not grant him an audience". Berry notes that "John Paul rebuffed a priest haunted by Maciel's secrets a full year before Ratzinger broke from the Pope to order an investigation".
- Berry describes Maciel's influence in John Paul II's Church almost to the very end: "From 1998, when a group of ex-Legionaries filed a canonical process with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's tribunal, seeking Maciel's ouster for abusing them in seminary, until 2006, when Ratzinger-as-Benedict dismissed him from ministry, Maciel was a gilded force, raising millions of dollars, thanks to the support of John Paul and
the video images of the Pope and Maciel that the Legion gave to donors. By 2004 the Legion had a $650 million budget, and fewer than 650 priests".
- There's a side excursion into the case of Fr. Thomas Williams, for a long time the Legion's chief spokesman in the Anglophone world, who admitted recently that he had fathered a child many years ago.
- And how did the Legion leadership react (specifically Corcuera and Garza, the superior-general and chief financial officer, respectively), after Maciel was disciplined by Benedict XVI?
When the 2006 Vatican order banished Maciel to a life of prayer and penitence, the Legion sprang to his defense, announcing that Maciel had never been tried and, like Jesus, chose not to defend himself...
When Maciel died in 2008, the Legion revved up the publicity campaign, announcing that he had gone to heaven. A year later, after Corcuera revealed the news of Maciel's children, Garza spoke to Regnum Christi followers in Monterrey, telling them: 'We had the responsibility to assure that Our Father [Maciel] was in a house in a Legionary community because...the Vatican wanted Maciel handled in a certain way. This took us a good part of October, November, December of 2006; it wasn't until January or February of 2007 that we were in a position of power to start to think about what we were going to do.'...
The Legion never acknowledged in his lifetime that Maciel abused anyone. So strong was his psychological grip on the order that from 2006 through mid-2009, a year and a half after his death, Legion seminarians in Rome were being told that Maciel was falsely accused, a future saint, while in several countries, priests were leaving the order in protest.
- There's a convoluted account of Berry's conjecture on why Benedict XVI did not break up the Legionaries and start afresh, instead of trying to rebuild the order with the same people at the top. He believes that the Vatican has been trying to get hold of the Legion's finances, tightly held by Garza, and that is why Garza has been kept on.
I find the conjecture offensive, naturally. But De Paolis really does not have a plausible explanation for keeping on Maciel's two top lieutenants, which is even more offensive.
- Berry ends with an astounding bit of information:
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a powerful canon lawyer in the CDFG when the 1998 case was active, ended up helping the defendant, Maciel. Bertone left the doctrinal congregation to become archbishop of Genoa, Italy, and while there, in 2003, he wrote a glowing preface to the Italian edition of Christ Is My Life, Maciel's spin-control memoir, a last-ditch effort to keep himself from being punished. "The key to [his] success," Bertone wrote, "is, without doubt, the attractive force of the love of Christ."
Why on earth Bertone would have done that at all is unbelievable - given what he knew of the complaints that had been formally filed with the CDF in 1998! He obviously could not have been in touch with Cardinal Ratzinger who was already preparing to send Mons. Scicluna on his fact-finding and witness-interview mission to the USA and Mexico in 2004. Bertone was, of course, an ardent follower of John Paul II, who made him a bishop and eventually Archbishop of Genoa, so he probably thought that if John Paul II saw no evil in Maciel at all, then he would go with the Pope's judgment. Despite what he knew from the CDF files.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/06/2012 06:48]