How Fr. Maciel built his empire

... "U hebt het geluk gehad 64 jaar te leven onder de leiding van Uw stichter. U gaat nu Uw weg vervolgen onder leiding van Uw nieuwe leider maar U gaat nog genieten van de vaderlijke affectie en ervaring van pater Maciel", schreef paus Johannes Paulus II .

Second of Two Parts
National Catholic Reporter
Jason Berry
Apr. 12, 2010

eerste deel: Money paved way for Maciels influence in the Vatican

Mexico City: the flashpoint in the deepening Legion scandal

Rome in 1946, following World War II, was in an economic shambles when an obscure young priest with deep pockets arrived seeking meetings with Vatican officials. The scion of a provincial Mexican aristocracy, Marcial Maciel Degollado had been a priest only two years, yet when a cameraman filmed his ordination he was already leading his own religious order, the Legion of Christ.

Maciel had gone to Rome by way of Madrid, Spain, where he sought scholarships the Franco government had offered for Latin American seminarians to study in Spain. The Spanish foreign minister, Alberto Martín Artajo, told him he needed Vatican approval for the "apostolic schoolboys" back home to qualify.

With funds from several of Mexico's wealthiest families and its president, Miguel Alemán Valdés, he wrangled a meeting with Clemente Micara, a newly named cardinal and veteran papal diplomat. Micara, 67, was obsessed with rebuilding Rome. Maciel, tall and lean with fair brown hair and searchlight eyes, spoke no Italian, but Micara spoke Spanish. Maciel gave Micara $10,000, "a huge sum in a city reeling from the war," said a knowledgeable priest.

The Legion of Christ: A History, dictated by Maciel and published by a Legion imprint in 2004, doesn't mention the payment to Micara, but the book says that Maciel traveled with "a confidential document and a sum of money" from Mexico's papal nuncio for delivery to Cardinal Nicola Canali, the governor of the Vatican city-state. The two cardinals helped Maciel gain an audience with Pope Pius XII, who proved sympathetic. Maciel went back to Madrid with letters of approval. In August 1946, Maciel and 34 apostolic schoolboys from Mexico sailed to Spain.

Why would the Holy See, with established channels to transmit documents, entrust sensitive material to a priest without diplomatic passport? The other part of the story — "a sum of money" — was the shape of things to come.

Maciel forced all Legionaries to take private vows, never to speak ill of Maciel or any superiors, and to report to their superiors anyone who did. The vows ensured his cult of personality. Juan Vaca and seven other early victims of Maciel who first spoke publicly, in the 1997 Hartford Courant report by Gerald Renner and this writer, gave graphic accounts of how, in Spain and Rome in the 1950s, they watched Maciel inject himself with a morphine painkiller called dolantin, as the drug was called at the time. In 1956, a strung-out Maciel entered Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome. Cardinal Valerio Valeri, a reed-like former diplomat and prefect for Congregation of Religious, was furious over letters from an older seminarian in Mexico City who had seen Maciel self-inject and worried about his overly affectionate behavior with boys. The priest who ran the Legion high school was also concerned about Maciel's drug use and advances on youths. Valeri suspended Maciel and arranged for Carmelite priests to assume control of the Legion house. They began questioning the boys, who admitted years later how they lied to protect him, and themselves. "We didn't know what to do," Vaca, now a psychology professor in New York, reflected. "Our lives would have ended." They feared the investigating priests would deem them sinners.

Valeri did not publicize Maciel's suspension. Maciel traveled between Spain and Latin America, raising money for a big project underway in Rome: Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica. Maciel got his break in 1959 when Pius XII died. Micara, by then the vicar of Rome, signed an order reinstating Maciel — something for which, in the interregnum between popes, he had no authority to do. Canon law puts official duties in abeyance in the interim. What were Valeri and other officials who were offended by Maciel to do? Expend what capital they had with the new pontiff, challenging Micara over a druggy priest with a vice for boys but cash lines to build a basilica? Maciel was redeemed by an illegitimate order from a cardinal to whom he had given $10,000 13 years before, according to a priest with access to Legion files. Micara, who had blessed the cornerstone, wanted infrastructure. Maciel had the money.

Like the captured U.S. soldiers brainwashed by Chinese communists in "The Manchurian Candidate," a Cold War film, the seminarians from Mexico carried traumatic scars of Maciel's psychological tyranny for decades. Unlike the movie characters, Maciel's victims never forgot. In 1998, José Barba, a Mexico City college professor and former Legion seminarian with Vaca, went to Rome with another of the original victims and filed a canon law appeal in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, requesting a Vatican prosecution of Maciel.

Targeting women of wealth
Maciel's financial strategy targeted the wives of wealthy men. A crucial supporter was Flora Barragán, the widow of an industrialist in Mexico's steel-producing city of Monterrey. After Barragán's death, her daughter told Barba that she had donated $50 million to the Legion. Barba, who teaches at the Autonomous Technical Institute of Mexico, said that he cannot verify the $50 million figure but said "Flora's support was substantial."
Barba entered the Legion in 1948, at 11, and left in 1962. He earned a doctorate at Harvard in Latin American literature.

"Maciel was in the habit of buying things in cash," Barba told NCR during a March 4 interview in Mexico City.

Barba continued: "Maciel was 27 when he purchased the [first seminary] estate. In 1950 he began construction on the Instituto Cumbres, the first prep school, in Mexico City, the land for which Flora provided. That summer he also inaugurated Collegio Massimo in Rome. He was 30. In 1953 he tried to start construction of a college in Salamanca. I was there," said Barba. "The bishop was sick; he failed to lay the cornerstone. He began the work in 1954 and completed it five years later. It was also in 1954 that he [Maciel] purchased the old spa in Ontenada, Spain, which had its own lake, for another seminary. Again, he paid cash. Fr. Gregorio López, a Legion priest, told me he delivered the money, wrapped in thin paper, to Leopoldo Corinez," who represented the family that owned the property. "I do not know the exact amount."

In 1958 he built a seminary in Salamanca, Spain, thanks to the largesse of Josefita Pérez Jiménez, the daughter of a former Venezuelan dictator.

Maciel reaped lasting dividends in Monterrey with the Garza-Sada families. The dynasty dates to 1890, when Isaac Garza and his brother-in-law, Francisco Sada, opened a brewery. Isaac's sons, Eugenio and Roberto Garza Sada, both graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a bottling factory in 1943. As they branched into other industries, the Garza brothers founded a university, TEC — the Technical Institute of Superior Studies in Monterrey.

Maciel launched private schools in Monterrey, one for boys, one for girls. He exported to America a model for prep schools to attract well-heeled families who would join Regnum Christi, which organized study groups to discuss Maciel's letters. Lay celibates, the highest level of Regnum Christi members, live in communities and work relentlessly on fundraising. The Web site http://www.life-after-rc.com/, run by a former Regnum Christi leader, documents the cult-like dynamics with messages of people who have lost loved ones to "the Movement."

Monterrey was Maciel's financial springboard. After Dionisio Garza died in 1991, his wife and several of his children donated to the Legion. Media reports have likened the Garza family wealth to that of the Rockefellers.

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