Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [93]
In the internal politics over celibacy, Kunze sided with Castrillón, Tony McDaid, and others while a liberal camp supported the option for priests to marry. When Cardinal Castrillón was away, Archbishop Ternyak hosted a visiting nuncio from Hungary. Kunze says, “He told everyone how great they were doing with a married clergy in Hungary”—an offshoot of the Communist resistance. “A group of us were looking at our feet, red in the face, while others smiled. It was a small show of power on Ternyak’s part.”
No one discussed the economic impact from the long tide of men leaving the priesthood, many of whom had raised funds and managed parish budgets. The exodus was like that of a college losing seasoned professors or a newsroom its veteran editors, forcing an operation to do more with less, sacrificing quality in the process.
Monsignor Mauro Piacenza, a native of Genoa, slender, bespectacled, a devotee of opera, handled much of the Italian writing for Castrillón. Words poured out of Piacenza, written or spoken. The topics that animated him—theology, saints, a desire to shift control of the Curia from the Secretariat of State (under Sodano) to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (under Ratzinger)—were a tad sublime. But Kunze, who admired Ratzinger, shared Piacenza’s view of the CDF, the office where theologians’ works were judged for doctrinal purity, as a preferable high point of power in the Curia.
Father Maciel was quite close to Cardinal Sodano, but the Legion’s more important champion was Pope John Paul II himself.
In January 1979, on his first trip as pontiff, John Paul visited Mexico. Maciel sat on the plane with him, a reward for extensive advance work. Thanks to a Legionary priest who said private Masses for the First Lady, President José López Portillo decided to greet John Paul at the airport—a potent symbol in a heavily Catholic nation with a history of persecuted priests.20 Six months later, John Paul showed his appreciation with a visit to the Legionaries in Rome.21 A video camera captured priceless moments of Maciel with the pope.
Troubled by the liberal drift of religious orders since Vatican II, John Paul was determined to restore the moorings of orthodoxy. As the priest shortage worsened, Maciel was competing with Opus Dei to recruit young men committed to papal teachings. The Legion had a financial engine in Regnum Christi, which had sixty thousand members, mostly laypeople, many of them upper middle class, some quite wealthy. One wing of Regnum Christi consisted of “consecrated women” who lived in communities, rather like nuns, staffing Legion prep schools. “One of the most powerful demonstrations of strength by the Legion,” the Spanish journalist Alfonso Torres Robles has written, “was its fiftieth anniversary celebration on January 3, 1991, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, when John Paul II ordained 60 Legionaries into the priesthood, in the presence of 7000 Regnum Christi members from different countries, 15 cardinals, 52 bishops, and many millionaire benefactors from Mexico [and] Spain.”22
The pageantry filmed at ordination ceremonies was vital to the Legion’s Web and mail marketing, selling videocassettes or bestowing them on donors. “People who wanted to give money were quick to do so if they found that the group was united to the pope,” explains Glenn Favreau, who left the Legion in 1997 after thirteen years and had frequent dealings with Maciel. A 1991 film sequence shows a vibrant John Paul, clad in white, greeting a vast crowd of Legionaries and Regnum Christi members at a Vatican audience, amid waving banners and crescendo cheers as the Holy Father, with a deep voice and satisfied smile, calls out Father Maciel.
The Legion had a $650 million annual operating budget, according to a 2006 Wall Street Journal report.23 An ex-Legionary who had held a high position says, “The budget was well over $1 billion, easily. How all the pieces operate is a