Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [89]
Father Maciel had befriended Castrillón, then president of the Latin American bishops’ council, in the late 1980s. Praised by Gabriel García Márquez as “this rustic man with the profile of an eagle,” Castrillón was a scourge of liberation theology, the Latin American movement of “a Church being born from the faith of the poor,” in the words of the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff.1 Castrillón believed in helping the poor, but he looked to the prevailing winds from Rome. In 1985 Cardinal Ratzinger jolted the Brazilian bishops by imposing a yearlong “silence” on Boff, which turned the prolific Franciscan into a national hero. A student of Ratzinger’s in Germany years before, Boff had likened the Vatican tribunal that judged theologians to “a Kafkaesque process wherein the accuser, the defender, the lawyer and the judge are one and the same.”2 Boff wanted open theological inquiry. Ratzinger attacked him for an “uncritical use of Marxist mode of analysis.”3 In a dispassionate account of the conflict, Harvard Divinity professor Harvey Cox observed:
In their famous meeting at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, the Latin American bishops proclaimed that the church should exercise a preferential option for the poor. Liberation theology is an expression of this preference. It is the attempt to interpret the Bible and Christianity from the perspective of the poor. It is in no sense a liberal or modernist theological deviation. Rather, it is a method, an effort to look at the life and message of Jesus through the eyes of those who have normally been excluded or ignored … [Liberation theologians] work closely with the burgeoning “Christian base communities” of Latin America. These are local groups of Catholics, most of whom are from the lowest tiers of society, whose study of the Bible has led them to become active in grassroots political movements. Thus liberation theology provides both an alternative to the topdown method of conventional academic and ecclesial theology as well as a source of guidance to the long-neglected people at the bottom.4
“Boff will have to ask God to forgive him,” huffed Castrillón, “and when God answers, then the pope and I will know whether to forgive him or not.”5
When John Paul II summoned Castrillón to the Curia in 1996, the Colombian had an ally in Father Maciel, who sent young Legionaries to move his boxes into the Vatican apartment. Castrillón was grateful, although they smashed a leg of his grand piano which had to be fixed. Sending seminarians to do heavy lifting folded into Father Maciel’s way of cultivating Vatican officials.
Chris Kunze had barely seen the surface of Maciel’s politesse.
Rome was in a postwar shambles when Maciel, an obscure young priest, arrived in 1946 in hopes of meeting Pope Pius XII. He had been ordained only two years, but at that ceremony in Mexico City a cameraman filmed the twenty-four-year-old at the altar, with steepled fingers and a deep sigh as in the opening scene of a cinematic life. The footage would be used for the Legion’s lucrative marketing in later years.6 Maciel founded his order while in private tutelage for the priesthood under Francisco González Arias, one of his four uncles who were bishops, and the one who ordained him. Maciel, twenty-six, had gone to Rome via Madrid, seeking scholarships the Franco government had announced for Latin American seminarians to study in Spain. The Spanish foreign minister, Alberto Martín-Artajo, told Maciel he needed Vatican approval if his Mexican “apostolic schoolboys” were to qualify for the Spanish benefits.7
With the backing of several of Mexico’s wealthiest families, including that of its president, Miguel Alemán Valdés, Maciel wangled a meeting with Clemente Micara, a newly named cardinal. Maciel, tall, lean, with fair brown hair and searchlight eyes, spoke no Italian; Micara, a portly sixty-seven-year-old