Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [110]
And so, during the first week of December 2004, Maciel stepped down as the Legion’s superior general. The Legionaries elected Álvaro Corcuera, a forty-seven-year-old priest from Mexico City and a frequent visitor in the Apostolic Palace, courtesy of Bishop Dziwisz. A product of Legion schools, Corcuera was popular within the order, adulated Maciel, and was hardly prepared for what was to come.
The pope was too ill on Good Friday so Ratzinger led the Stations of the Cross in the Colosseum. His words shot across the media grid: “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Him.” As journalist Robert Blair Kaiser wrote, Ratzinger was “nailing down a campaign theme” in his pursuit of the papacy.82
Born in Malta, Monsignor Charles Scicluna cut an unlikely figure as Ratzinger’s investigator. In his early forties, short, stout, with thinning black hair, cherubic cheeks, and tiny hands, the canonist cut an ironic counterimage to his title: promoter of justice. But Scicluna was tough. He had briefed American canonists on how to send their nightmare cases to the CDF. His punitive approach clashed with the clubby circles of clergy in Rome who saw priests’ rights under assault. Scicluna spoke English with a British accent; his Spanish bore traces of Italian, as Juan Vaca noticed when he gave his testimony at an Upper East Side church on April 2, 2005. Scicluna asked questions, a priest-secretary typed on a laptop, Vaca recounted the horrors of his past. During a break, they learned the news from Rome: John Paul had died.
Chris Kunze watched the solemn majesty of John Paul’s death from his home in Waco, Texas, in mourning for the pope he revered. Now married and the father of a toddler, Kunze had written John Paul about his encounters with Maciel. On the flight to Mexico City, where he would join Barba and others as witnesses, Kunze thought, I don’t want Father Maciel to go to hell. This is a chance for him to repent, do penance, to say he is sorry to victims who have waited decades. Imagine their suffering! Mine is nothing compared to what they went through.
Monsignor Scicluna took the testimony of more than twenty men in Mexico City. He returned to Rome with a satchel of books on Maciel published in Spanish and English, and videotapes of news investigations Barba had culled. The canonical prosecutor arrived in the Vatican where his boss had become the new pope. Barely a month into Benedict’s papacy, the Legionaries issued a May 20 news release disclosing that the “Holy See” had informed them that “there is no canonical process under way regarding our founder … nor will one be initiated.” The Vatican Press Office confirmed the statement. The Legion pronounced Maciel “exonerated,” just as other witnesses were arriving in Rome to testify before Scicluna. But the case-closed document, as John Allen reported, came not from Scicluna’s office, which had jurisdiction over the case, but from the office of Cardinal Sodano, in a fax bearing the Secretariat of State’s seal.83 Then irony dealt Maciel a fateful hand. In 1995 he had nominated Bishop Rafael Guízar Valencia, his uncle, for sainthood. In 2006 the Congregation for the Causes of Saints gave its approval. The document for Guízar’s sainthood was on Benedict’s desk to sign as the pope mulled the contents of Scicluna’s report. For a Vatican-protected pederast to attend his uncle’s beatification would invite a media bloodbath. On