Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [105]
“Maciel went to the pope through Monsignor Dziwisz,” says Father A. “Two weeks later Pironio signed it.”
Whether John Paul read the document is doubtful. Dziwisz’s swift delivery suggests he was financially beholden to the Legion well before the $50,000 gift. For Maciel, the encoded trampling of individual rights approved by the pope was a huge victory. Several years after Pironio’s death, John Paul appointed Martínez Somalo, a diplomat, to head a renamed Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Maciel dispatched Father A to Cardinal Martínez Somalo’s home with an envelope. “I didn’t bat an eye,” he recalls. “I went up to his apartment, handed him the envelope, said good-bye.” He says the envelope held $90,000. “It was a way of making friends, ensuring certain help if it were needed, oiling the cogs, so to speak.” Martínez Somalo ignored the 1997 allegations against Maciel. John Paul later named him camerlango, or chamberlain, the official in charge of the papal conclave. Martínez Somalo rebuffed my interview requests put through the Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, and the receptionist at his home.
“Martínez Somalo was talked about a lot in the Legion … un amigo de Legion,” recalls Glenn Favreau, a Washington, D.C., attorney who left the order in 1997 after seven years in Rome. Favreau, who was not abused by Maciel, explains: “There were cardinals who weren’t amigos. They wouldn’t call them enemies, but everyone knew who they were. Pio Laghi did not like the Legion.” Cardinal Laghi, a former nuncio to the United States, was prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education.
Of all the cardinals in the Curia, Sodano was the closest to Maciel. Their relationship dated to the Pinochet years in Chile, ideological soul mates from the start. In 1980 the Legion needed Cardinal Raúl Silva Henriquez’s permission to establish schools in Santiago. A critic of the Pinochet regime for its human rights atrocities, Silva had misgivings about “los millionarios de Cristo,” as some Mexicans derisively called them. Still, he met with the Legion emissaries, including the rector of Mexico’s Anáhuac University, which Maciel had founded in 1964. Several advisory bishops begged Silva not to admit them. “In a society as polarized as Chile at the time,” the journalist Andrea Insunza and Javier Ortega report, “the Legionaries found a key ally: the apostolic nuncio, Angelo Sodano.”67
Sodano backed the Legion and Opus Dei in Chile not just to blunt liberation theology advocates on the left. Neo-Pentecostal sects were wooing conservative Catholics who liked the scripture classes and felt a sense of mutual care in the emotional fervor of services. Catholic-style prosperity theology embraced orthodoxy, papal loyalty, and free-market capitalism. Wealth-as-virtue begat gifts to the church. The tradeoff was tolerance of Latin American political repression versus the Soviet Communist brand. Silva, who helped labor unions in the police state, made human rights an issue. Sodano, who supported Pinochet, pressed the Legion’s case. Silva capitulated. Later, a Jesuit asked him why. “Don’t talk to me about it, please,” Silva said ruefully.68
Maciel put Father Raymond Cosgrave, an Irish Legionary, at Sodano’s disposal as a virtual aide-de-camp at the nunciature in Santiago. In 1989, on track to become secretary of state, Sodano took English classes in Dublin at a Legion school. He went on holiday at a Legion vacation home in Sorrento. Back in Rome, explains Favreau, “Sodano came over with his entire family, two hundred of them, for a big meal when he was named cardinal. And we fed them all. When Sodano became secretary of state there was another celebration. He’d come over for special events, like the groundbreaking for the Center for Higher Studies performed with a golden shovel. And a dinner after that.
“Cardinal Sodano helped