Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [158]
To sustain its $650 million budget, the Legion had a sophisticated fund-raising operation in Hamden, Connecticut, which at its peak in 2005 employed a hundred professionals. “If an employee became ill they’d go out of their way to help,” Fredrik Akerblom, a former fund-raiser, told me. “If someone had cancer, they’d keep him on payroll and do everything to help. That was one aspect I respected and liked. But they didn’t provide health care for the [Legion] brothers. There was a lot of internal discussion about their culture of young men bearing it out for Christ, and using that to make the families pay for the insurance.”
Mary Kunze—Chris Kunze’s mother and a hospital bioethicist in Elm Grove, Wisconsin—reflected on her daughter, who in 2010 was living in a Regnum Christi community in Dublin, after fifteen years as a consecrated woman. “I speak to Elizabeth at least once a month,” Mrs. Kunze told me. “The last time, I asked if she’d had a pap smear or mammogram. She never has. In her last physical, she didn’t have blood work or urine analysis. They neglect the quiet little people like my daughter. She’s not getting any money, can’t come home unless we send money, and is not even getting basic medical care. She’s forty-five, at an age where women need these baseline tests. They have no health insurance. And it’s such a wealthy order! She says she’s happy and feels she’s doing God’s work, but I really doubt it; the brainwashing is so deep. These women don’t ask for things they need. They feel by asking they are selfish. They don’t have the basic human rights. I wish Benedict would really go in and clean it up.”
“For the most part, Legionaries and consecrated are self-insured by the Legion,” the order’s lay spokesman Jim Fair told me. “Most do not have actual insurance, but we simply pay for care.”
Roberta Garza, the youngest sibling of Father Luis Garza, the Legion vicar general, said that when her sister in Regnum Christi returned to Mexico from Rome “every couple of years, they would count on us to pay for her medical treatments, and they were not small. I remember she had her spleen removed and another time all her teeth repaired, and I’m not talking just a small filling. She seemed to not have any regular checkups or any preventive treatment whatsoever while under the Legion’s care, and she would come home in order to have her long overdue medical needs paid for by her family.”
Akerblom had been a Regnum Christi member in Connecticut before returning to his native Sweden. “Over time,” he explained, “I realized that our donors interpreted anything critical of the Legion as an attack on their faith. The Legion had a brilliant way of dealing with those criticisms: we never speak ill of anyone who criticizes us. Donors felt the liberal establishment was hounding them. The Legionaries created the idea that they were under siege, that anything negative about them was an expression of that fallen world.
“We sent out millions of fund-raising letters, literally millions,” Akerblom told me. “The appeal was young men in cassocks. That conveyed something deep to people, a hope that what they perhaps had grown up with and what had almost disappeared from the church was coming back: young men well groomed, orthodox in their beliefs, conservative in their views. We raised a lot of money. My personal concern when I worked there was that we frankly did not know what happened with money after it left the fund-raising office.”
The fund-raising staff in Hamden worked the phones, direct-mail appeals,