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By Root 1459 0

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