• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1479 0

gave Legion leaders time to regroup and work with Vatican officials. The Legion, through its news service Zenit, released occasional notices of Father Álvaro Corcuera, the superior general, meeting with Benedict. Picture the pope’s predicament. As with the Society of St. Pius X, he confronted a group that was beyond orthodoxy, and in this case trained in obedience to a sociopath. The Legion was moral relativism at the outer edge: the spiritual formation of the priests and seminarians, who took private vows never to speak ill of Maciel, was subjugated to his mental tyranny. Praising and defending Maciel shaped the Legion ethos. As Ratzinger’s closest canon law adviser, Scicluna had ample evidence for a shutdown, which would have sent a major signal to the media of a pope committed to reform. Why did he hold back? The new pope had two options; neither one was simple.

Ending the Legion required a plan for retraining the priests, seminarians, and RC members with therapy and pastoral counseling—no easy job. That was the route for a moral absolutist. As Camus wrote, “Super human is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.”14

Or, was it preferable to show flexibility, take the route of moral relativism, be patient with the behavior of Legionaries who carried a personal history of warped training, bring the order under Vatican control, get a grasp of its finances, and postpone a decision on the “name brand,” its public identity?

For Benedict, the 2006 decision marked a confrontation between the moral absolutist and flexible governance over a corrupt religious group. The pope under Sodano’s influence chose to salvage the group, now that its founder was in exile. The Legion immediately showed its schizophrenia by pledging fealty to Benedict while announcing that Maciel felt “tranquility of conscience,” and, like Jesus, had chosen not to defend himself. The Legion launched into a campaign of internal marketing to assure its followers that Maciel had never been tried. Ergo, he was not guilty.

“One thing that always struck me about the Legion is how they constantly had to justify themselves,” says the attorney Glenn Favreau, recalling his thirteen years in the order. “They defined themselves in opposition to others—critics of Maciel, enemies of the Legion. Take away Maciel, what were they?”

The Vatican’s containment strategy of 2006 collapsed in 2009 when the Legion revealed to its followers that Maciel had a grown daughter out of wedlock. Corcuera, the superior general, long afflicted with migraine headaches and insomnia, had gone to the various religious houses, breaking the painful news. How long had he, and the austere Luis Garza as chief financial officer, known how money donated to the Legion was channeled to the support of Maciel’s shadow family in Madrid? When did Corcuera tell Benedict? Certain Legion advocates issued apologies for having defended him in the past. “Surprising, difficult to understand, and inappropriate for a Catholic priest,” offered a Legion spokesman in mild under-statement.15 Several prominent Legion priests left the order.

And so, in 2009, the Vatican authorized an investigation of the entire religious order, a move unprecedented in modern church history.

The Legion’s identity dilemma became a tar baby for the Vatican, a sticky creature spawned in the thickets of mendacity that would vex church officials and Pope Benedict amid the abuse scandals of 2010.

As those events registered in Italy as never before, the Holy See faced a U.S. lawsuit brought in Oregon by the victim of a priest who had been moved from Ireland to America.16 When an Oregon appeals court refused to dismiss the case, which accused the Vatican of complicity, the lead attorney, Jeff Anderson, gained a foothold he had sought for years. Before the year was out, Jeff Anderson and Pope Benedict would stand at distant poles of the scandal, in an exquisite irony, each seeking justice for Maciel’s victims.

CHAPTER 12

ANOTHER CALIFORNIA

The energy that burned through him began before dawn on a blend of