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Eleven days after the announcement Father Álvaro Corcuera, the superior general, traveled from Rome to New York City for a four-hour meeting with Juan Vaca. Vaca was the first to denounce Maciel, naming victims’ names, in correspondence to the Vatican in 1976, 1978, and 1989. He had settled in Long Island. The twelve-year psychosexual entanglement with Maciel, which began when he was twelve, had caused him to study psychology after leaving the priesthood, trying to determine “where sickness ends and evil starts.” Trim and hale, with thinning hair and a resonant voice, Juan Vaca had a gentlemanly Latin demeanor. He had made a career as a college teacher and guidance counselor, married late, and had a teenage daughter he adored.

Corcuera denied my interview request. A Legion spokesman, Jim Fair, said, “He did meet with Vaca, and others in Mexico, as part of his outreach.”16

That outreach was another twist in Pope Benedict’s lurching road toward justice, now that the Vatican had taken control of the strange organization. Corcuera, age fifty-three, came from an upper-middle-class Mexico City family; he had been a frequent guest at the Apostolic Palace when the Legion was sending money to the papal secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz.

The meeting with Vaca took place at Mercy College in midtown Manhattan, where Vaca was an adjunct professor. The two men sat in a conference room. “He embraced me in a manly, Mexican way and was about to kneel down in asking my forgiveness,” Vaca recounted. “I said no, and had him sit at the head of the table, and I to his immediate right.”

Corcuera struck him as relaxed, seemingly kind. Vaca called him “Álvarito,” a Latin term of endearment. He assumed an avuncular role, asking the younger priest about his background. Corcuera recalled his youth in a Legion school, inspired by Maciel to join the order. He had gone to seminary in Orange, Connecticut, when Vaca was a superior. (The campus was recently on the real estate market, as the Legion began downsizing.) Vaca did not remember Corcuera from those years; he had worked with many seminarians before leaving in 1976 to join the Rockville Centre diocese. “You were nice to me,” said Corcuera. He explained that when he became superior general to succeed Maciel, in 2004, the election came as a surprise for him.

“Well, Maciel trained you for the job,” Vaca clarified.

Corcuera insisted he was elected at an open chapter, not handpicked by Maciel. “I asked point-blank if Corcuera knew about Maciel’s abuses,” Vaca told me. “He said no. I said, ‘You knew he sent money to the ladies,’ meaning the mother in Madrid, Norma and her daughter. He said, ‘I learned after 2004.’ He didn’t give a specific date on when he learned it, and I didn’t press him.”

After letting Corcuera talk for an hour or so, Vaca recounted how Maciel had abused him and other seminarians decades ago; how he had pulled Maciel, passed out on morphine, from drowning in a hotel bathtub in Tetuán, Morocco, in 1957, the year Corcuera was born. “He felt ashamed. He hung his head, whispering, I do believe you. He put his face in his hands,” said Vaca.

Corcuera told Vaca that Legionaries were circulating his 1976 letter denouncing Maciel, naming the twenty other seminary victims. If that was true, it marked a striking shift from the summer of 2009, when two Legion priests in Rome told me that the seminarians were still being taught about Maciel’s heroic life.

Vaca accepted his apologies, adding, “But this is not a solution.” He insisted that the Legion provide fair compensation for the harm and damages to him and other victims. Corcuera replied that the Legion in Rome had formed a committee to explore the issue. He asked Vaca what he thought would be fair compensation. Refusing to name a figure, Vaca told him to look at what American dioceses had paid in victim settlements. Vaca had a deeper issue: how the order had engaged in “slandering me” while defending Maciel. “Think about that. Come up with an amount. I’m not going to tell you how much.