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fault, citing only the “incapacity and weakness on the part of the Pope’s subordinates, who ought to have had, when circumstances demanded it, the courage to lead according to the pattern he had set” (p. 514). Regarding the abuse crisis, that “pattern” is the issue. Weigel does not identify those subordinates, which is not surprising. Hagiography is no handmaiden of history; however, a valid case for sainthood cannot be made without confronting the factual reality, and human failings, in the life of a given candidate for sainthood.

Weigel treats Maciel as a master of deception, the pope as his victim. On page 552 of The End and the Beginning, Weigel in footnote 139 says that he interviewed Maciel on February 19, 1998. This is remarkable. Maciel avoided journalists for most of his life; after the 1997 Hartford Courant report he gave an orchestrated statement to Jésus Colina, the Regnum Christi editor of Zenit, the Legion news service, for the book Christ Is My Life (2003), which constituted his self-defense. Weigel actually got Maciel to talk a year after the Hartford Courant report of February 23, 1997, that put his victims on record. What did Weigel ask him? What did Maciel say? For years thereafter, Weigel’s endorsement of the Legion was prominent on the website LegionaryFacts.org, which defended Maciel against his putative enemies, the victims. In 2009, when the news broke on Maciel’s daughter, Weigel used the First Things website to call for a Vatican investigation of the Legion. Better late than never, Weigel was also engaging in a personal form of spin control, positioning himself against his previous support of the order and his own record of whitewashing history.

3. A June 2010 editorial in New Oxford Review, “The Double Life of Marcial Maciel,” quoted Podles as saying that Groër “had molested almost every student he had come into contact with for decades.” In response to my e-mail about his source, Podles wrote on November 20, 2010: “A German homosexual web site claimed that Groer had molested almost every student (1,000+) that he had come into contact with. I asked Cardinal [Christoph] Schönborn about this claim, and he said that Groer had made strong homoerotic gestures to most of his students, but that the gestures did not extend as far as penetration.”

4. John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Apostolic Letter, to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, May 22, 1994, www.vatican.va.

5. See in particular Paul Lakeland, The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church (New York, 2003).

6. Garry Wills, Papal Sin (New York, 2000), p. 190.

7. Eugene Kennedy, The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality (New York, 2001), p. 66.

8. Marco Politi, “The Church’s New Age of Dissent,” The Tablet, March 21, 2009.

9. Ibid.

10. “MG Critical Path” study, no author or release date given.

11. Avery Dulles, “What Distinguishes the Jesuits?” America, January 15, 2007.

12. “ ‘Psalter of My Hours,’ the Work Plagiarized by Maciel,” Catholic News Agency, December 18, 2009.

13. U.S. Federal Court, Minnesota District, case no. 0:04-CV-02895-RHK-AJB, Sellors v. Legionaries of Christ et al., filed June 4, 2004, http://www.mnd.uscourts.gov/. See also Giselle Sainte Marie, “Gospel Charity Cuts Both Ways: Lifting the Veil on How the Legion Builds Their Kingdom: The Familia Saga,” www.regainnetwork.org.

14. Albert Camus, “The Almond Trees,” Lyrical and Critical Essays (New York, 1968), p. 135.

15. Jason Berry, “Legionary Founder Said to Father a Child,” National Catholic Reporter, February 3, 2010.

16. U.S. District Court of Oregon, case no. CV 02 430 MO, John Doe v. Holy See.

CHAPTER 12: ANOTHER CALIFORNIAS

1. Jill Hodges, “Attacking Abuse: Lawyer Finds His Niche Suing Authority Figures in Abuse Cases,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 20, 1991.

2. Peter Slavin, “Jeff Anderson, Jousting with the Vatican from a Small Law Office in St. Paul,” Washington Post, April 19, 2010.

3. U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Division, case no. 10-CV-00346-RTR,