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diplomat, spoke Spanish. Maciel gave Micara $10,000, “a huge sum in a city reeling from the war,” says a priest with seasoned knowledge of Legion finances.8 The Legion of Christ: A History (all but dictated by Maciel and published by a Legion imprint) makes no mention of Maciel giving funds to Micara; however, it says that Maciel traveled with “a confidential document and a sum of money” from Mexico’s apostolic delegate (nuncio) for Cardinal Nicola Canali, the governor of the Vatican city-state.9 Canali, a leading Fascist sympathizer during the war, got along well with Maciel, who was a devotee of General Franco.10 The two cardinals helped Maciel gain an audience with Pope Pius XII. Maciel returned to Madrid with letters of approval that allowed the apostolic schoolboys from Mexico to study in Spain. But why would the Holy See, with established channels to transmit documents, entrust sensitive material to a priest without a diplomatic passport? The other part of the story, “a sum of money,” was the shape of things to come.

The Midas touch of Father Maciel opens into a saga of how one man financially seduced influential members of the Roman Curia, compromising their values as he cultivated powerful conservatives from Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire (and by some accounts the world’s richest man), to Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza and Ave Maria University in Florida. Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who praised Maciel’s “radiant holiness,” became President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the Holy See. Maciel cultivated a who’s who of Catholic conservatives to support the Legion or himself. The list includes former CIA director William Casey; Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things and a tireless propagandist for Maciel; George Weigel, the conservative activist and a biographer of John Paul II; William Bennett, the Reagan drug czar and subsequent CNN commentator; William Donohue of the Catholic League; Steve McEveety, the producer of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ; former Florida governor Jeb Bush; and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who spoke at Legion gatherings, as did former CNN correspondent Delia Gallagher. The list runs on.

But it was John Paul II and Vatican officials who put the imprimatur on Maciel by willfully ignoring the signs of rot in a man the Legionaries called Nuestro Padre, “Our Father.” Maciel was the master salesman of resurgent orthodoxy, an ethos of wealth-as-virtue that triumphed over liberation theology’s idealism in the Vatican mind-set. This religious mercantilism crystallized on John Paul’s 1999 trip to Mexico with Vatican-franchised street sales of papal trinkets and potato chip bags sporting the papal coat of arms. The scholar Elio Masferrer Kan has criticized this theology of prosperity,11 a gilded cousin to the prosperity gospel of commercially minded Pentecostal sects. Maciel embodied the theology of prosperity. The greatest fund-raiser of the modern church, Maciel used religion to make money, buying protection at the Vatican lest his secret life be exposed. For most of his life, it worked.

MILWAUKEE TO ROME

Chris Kunze witnessed the crossroads of faith and money on a 1990 trip to the Netherlands. He accompanied Father Maciel to Eindhoven and the home of Piet Derksen, a Catholic philanthropist. Maciel, who was thoroughly Mexican despite his French surname, spoke only Spanish. The mannered Latin persona held a piercing gaze behind his glasses. Maciel, seventy and nearly bald, took daily walks to keep trim despite a history of illness. He spoke in firm cadences, pausing for Kunze to translate into English for their Dutch host, stressing that the Legion was building the first university in Rome in generations. Kunze was supremely aware of his role in the presentation: a future priest in Maciel’s movement of neo-orthodoxy. Seminarians accompanied Legion priests to call on donors. “Derksen gave $1.5 million,” says Kunze, “which helped pay our debts in Germany and helped build Regina Apostolorum”—the university in Rome.

Born in 1961, Christopher