Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [102]
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