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By Root 1350 0

was with Jesuits, who had close ties to the upper class. Liberation theology gained popularity in Mexico in the 1960s. “The Jesuits would soon give up educating the wealthy,” writes the historian Enrique Krauze, “and turn their attention to ‘the Church of the poor.’ ”30 In major Mexican cities, Maciel’s schools would compete, but with a goal of capturing affluent supporters. In 1968 Eugenio Garza, a benefactor of the university Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, put pressure on the bishop to expel Jesuit chaplains from the campus and the order itself from the Nuevo León diocese. Five years later, in an unrelated event, Garza was killed by guerrillas in a botched kidnapping downtown. His funeral drew 200,000 people. “The murder shocked the business community, and chaos seemed imminent,” the New York Times reported later.

The family soon broke up its holding company, the Monterrey Group, into four businesses that could be managed—and protected—more easily. Alfa, one of the four, grew so fast in the mid-to-late 70’s that it soon became Latin America’s largest privately owned company, with $2.49 billion in sales [in 1994]. Three of its divisions are steel, petrochemicals and prepared foods.31

Eugenio Garza’s brother, Dionisio, grew close to Maciel, as did other members of the Garza family, which the Times likened to the Rockefellers. “One of my aunts gave Maciel a house,” says Roberta Garza, the youngest of Dionisio’s eight children. Born in 1966, Roberta Garza became an editor with Milenio newspaper in Mexico City. Her late father, “a conservative Victorian gentleman,” gave millions to the Legion. “Our family rarely watched TV. We came together after dinner and we talked.”32

As a girl Roberta spent hours reading in her grandfather’s library. “Neither my grandfather nor his brother were close to the Legionaries—they thought them pompous,” she continues. “After my uncle expelled the Jesuits, that left a void. The Legion went house to house, assigning a particular priest to a family. Father Maciel stressed, You must do much for the church since God has given much to you. He was flanked by a young priest or two. They would let slip, out of earshot, Nuestro Padre is so close to God, he can see through your soul … I was convinced he was a holy priest. But some things made me skeptical. I didn’t like the way people adored him without any question. Women loved him.”

When Roberta was eleven she went to France to board at an Academy of the Sacred Heart school. She read voraciously and began to write. During that time she received benevolent letters from Father Maciel. One of her older brothers, Luis Garza Medina (born in 1957), graduated from the Legion’s Irish Institute, a prep school in Monterrey. Under Maciel’s vision of a chosen elect, teachers encouraged students to see themselves as future priests or Regnum Christi servants. Roberta says that when Luis revealed his intention to become a priest, their father insisted he go to college first. At age sixteen Luis entered Stanford University and studied industrial engineering. “To make sure his vocation wasn’t lost amid California campus life,” explains Roberta, “the order sent a Legionary to room with him.”

“That was Maciel’s standard policy,” explains a longtime friend of Luis’s. “When you are a third-degree Regnum Christi member, you cannot live on your own—you need to go in pairs. At the end of sophomore year, Father Maciel sent someone to live with him.” After graduating from Stanford in 1978, Luis Garza joined the Legion. He was ordained in seven years; most Legionaries took ten. Another Garza sibling, Paulina, joined Regnum Christi and moved to Rome.

Roberta returned from Europe in 1980 for high school in Monterrey. She found it “rigid, highly traditional, but not analytical. One of my in-laws had a daughter who was not learning English. She complained to the Legionary priest. He actually told her: ‘The final judgment will not be in English.’ They were grooming us for the Movement. If your family had money, power, influence, they wanted you