• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1541 0

Kunze grew up in Milwaukee with a younger brother and twin sisters. His mother was a hospital administrator, his father a real estate agent who had fled Communist East Germany at fourteen. Kunze spent a year in the high school seminary, but it closed for lack of numbers. A fullback on his football team, he went on to Marquette University, majoring in philosophy. As a sophomore, he moved into Milwaukee’s major seminary, continuing classes at Marquette. Most of the seminarians were gay. After two faculty priests made sexual advances on him Kunze left in disgust. A Phi Beta Kappa, he graduated from Marquette in 1984, yearning to become a priest. A pastor suggested the Legion of Christ. Drawn to a “spiritual warrior mystique about the priesthood,” Kunze entered the Legion novitiate on an elegant estate in Cheshire, Connecticut.

In addition to Latin, Greek, and Spanish, he learned the history of Father Maciel’s odyssey from war-torn Mexico, how he gained support in Rome and built an educational network that spread to other countries. America had two dozen Legion prep schools and two seminaries.12 Maciel’s photograph hung in Legion schools, where students absorbed a mantra: Nuestro Padre is a living saint.

Kunze had never encountered such demanding discipline. Every Legionary took private vows, unique to the order, laying a hand on the Bible, swearing to never speak ill of Nuestro Padre nor any Legion superior, and to report any member who might be critical to the superiors. Speaking well of others was a virtue. The private vows rewarded spying as an act of faith. Sacrificing one’s own ambition in love for Christ and not criticizing others were hallmarks of a good Legionary. They had three hours of daily prayer and long periods of monastic silence. Superiors screened the letters they wrote home once a month and read their incoming mail. The men saw their families once a year. Cutting away from the family signaled one’s closeness to Christ.

That first year in Cheshire, Kunze made a forty-five-minute “general confession” to Father Owen Kearns, an Irishman. To prepare, Kunze reviewed “pages and pages I had written, recounting all the sins of my life, sins I had already confessed. It was embarrassing, and a little frightening, too.”

Out of the fear came a fierce cleansing, a purity in paring himself down, melding his will with an elite corps of men chosen by God to reevange-lize the Catholic Church. They embraced Maciel’s vision of saving the church from post–Vatican II decay as in liberation theology. Kunze and other young Legionaries wrote letters to Nuestro Padre, detailing their sins and shortcomings, hopes and aspirations. Forging a new life, Kunze felt a powerful surge of righteousness.

They spent hours discussing the constitution of the Legion of Christ.13 Of the many bylaws, the seminarians memorized important ones that dealt with life in the Congregation, as the religious order was called:

268. 1 Abhor slander as the worst of all evils and the greatest enemy of the union and charity among ourselves.

2. If someone, through gossip or any other means, seeks internal division among ourselves, he shall be removed immediately from the center where he is to be found and stripped of all responsibilities …

3. Superiors shall learn to amputate with a firm and steady hand any member infected with the mortal cancer of slander and intrigue, if they do not want to make themselves responsible for the ruin of the Congregation.

They studied Nuestro Padre’s letters written over many years, particularly his ruminations for the affiliate group, of predominantly laypeople, called Regnum Christi, Kingdom of Christ. Regnum Christi began in the 1970s. This passage bears a “Madrid, 1944” dateline, but was written a generation later:14

Worst of all is the terrible threat of Communism and the Protestant sects which try to tear away from [the church’s] bosom all the children she has made with her blood and whom she sustains through abundant and prolonged sacrifices …

[W]hen I meet up with the strength of youth withered and