Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [106]
Maciel approved separate gifts of $10,000 and $5,000 to Cardinal Sodano, according to former Legionaries. These priests consider these funds the tip of the iceberg for Sodano. Sodano’s photograph hung in the Regnum Christi center in Rome, embroidering the cardinal’s persona as champion of a growing lay movement. Regnum Christi’s success was his success, too.
Sodano declined my interview requests through the papal spokesman, Father Lombardi. Calls to Sodano’s residence were referred back to the Vatican.
Maciel wanted Vatican approval for Regina Apostolorum as a Pontifical Academy, the highest level of recognition by the Vatican. This would put the freshly minted university on equal footing with the much older Lateran and Gregorian universities. So it was, in 1999, that the Legionaries offered a Mercedes-Benz to Cardinal Pio Laghi, then-prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education (and former papal ambassador to the United States). Laghi, who has since died, was appalled and spurned the offer, according to Father B, who witnessed his outrage. Laghi’s successor, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, refused to grant the academic status. Regina Apostolorum lacked credentials in research, faculty, and international prestige, according to a knowledgeable official. The Lateran University, which was established in 1773, had received pontifical standing in 1910. In denying Maciel his university’s distinction, Grocholewski bucked the powerful Sodano. But Grocholewski, a Pole who had come to Rome as a seminarian in the cold war and never left, was a former prefect of the Signatura, confident of his position and ties to John Paul.
Sodano did Maciel a greater favor by pressuring Ratzinger to halt the canonical case in the CDF, as José Barba learned from his canon lawyer, Martha Wegan. Ratzinger, as archbishop of Munich and then as prefect of the CDF, had moved haltingly on other cases of sexual predators; the Vatican under John Paul had no uniform approach.70 His ideal of the priesthood as a chivalrous caste, resisting godless Communism, left him myopic, if not blind, to the cold truth of the 1990s as victims, lawyers, and journalists in English-speaking countries dug out evidence of appalling crimes in a clergy sexual underground.
Sodano was Machiavellian, Ratzinger a moral absolutist. Sodano’s reputation stood to suffer if Maciel were punished. By Sodano’s lights, the Maciel record of supplying vocations outweighed accusations from the 1950s on which Rome had already ruled. Truth didn’t matter anyway. This was Sodano’s logic in pushing a Vatican silent front as they eased out Groër, the pederast cardinal of Vienna. But Ratzinger could not have tabled a case as grave as Maciel’s without the approval of John Paul. The pope is the pope; they had a standing Friday lunch. In what now seems face-saving, Ratzinger told a Mexican bishop that an investigation of Maciel might not be “prudent,” as he had attracted so many men to the priesthood.71 How tepid a rationale from the law-and-order prefect who had waged intellectual war against Leonardo Boff, Hans Küng, and Charles Curran: humiliate prolific theologians, but look the other way when it was time to condemn a pedophile?
On a visit to Regina Apostolorum, Ratzinger refused a pay envelope after a lecture on theology. “Tough as nails in a very cordial way,” says Father A.
Maciel maintained his power courtesy of a warped tribunal system. He continued traveling from Rome to Madrid, on to Latin America and North America, visiting Legion centers, meeting the donors. Father Stephen