Vows of silence: Jason Berry on the power of John Paul II's papacy

Catholic New Times, Jan 16, 2005 by Ted Schmidt

Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul H by Jason Berry and Gerald Refiner, Free Press, New York, 2003, 353 pp.

Marcial Maciel and Tom Doyle are two contradictory faces of the Roman Catholic church today as it struggles with clerical sex abuse and its aftermath.

On January 4, 2001, Pope John Paul II appeared at a ceremony marking the sixtieth anniversary Of the founding of the Legionaires of Christ, a religious order founded in Mexico in 1941 by Marcial Maciel Dellogado. On that day, the group could boast of a network of schools, including universities in Maciel's native country, prep schools and seminaries in Spain, Latin America, Ireland and most recently in the United States.

The pope told the 20,000 people in attendance: "With special affection, I greet your beloved founder, Father Marcial Maciel, and extend to him my heartfelt congratulations."

Investigative journalists Jason Berry and Gerald Renner, in their explosive book, Vows of Silence: the Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II; doggedly lay out the evidence that nine ex-Legion members had filed charges against the group in a Vatican Court of Canon Law in 1998. Their sworn depositions alleged that all had been sexually abused by the man who had styled himself "nuestro padre."

As the authors marshalled their evidence, the Vatican refused comment. "No Vatican official ever told us Maciel was innocent. There was simply-no answer to the accusations," the authors ruefully write.

So Jason Berry's new book begins. In an hour-long interview with CNT from his home in New Orleans, Berry said he had thought that the whole sordid business of priest sexual abuse was behind him. A pioneer in documenting the staggering depth of the issue, Berry's 1992 book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, was to have been his last on the subject.

"Then, while working on my book on New Orleans jazz funerals (Berry is a well-respected jazz historian), I kept getting calls from people around the country, and in particular the Boston Globe people who had unearthed the Cardinal Law affair, which later won them a Pulitzer prize. It was a new ball game when Judge Sweeney gave the Boston Globe access diocesan files. It was unreal. You had some of the most expensive lawyers defending priests, and the church beating up on men like Fr. Charles Curran, while child molesters were rampant. It was so dysfunctional, a failure of great proportion of a system run by unmarried men."

Hence, Berry's new volume on the topic.

Maciel refused to be interviewed. A blue-chip Washington law firm attempted to quash the authors' first report in the Hartford Courant in 1997. Well-known Catholics on the right have come out four-square for Maciel, including papal biographer George Weigel, William Bennett, the former U.S. Education Secretary who now charges $50,000 a speech to comment on values and virtue (His price has gone down somewhat since it was revealed he had lost $8 million in casino gambling), Richard John Neuhaus, editor of The Last Things, Maryann Glendon, the Harvard professor, who has called Maciel, "a man of radiant holiness," and William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Legionaires: friends of the wealthy

When one reads the authors' exhaustive analysis of the Legionaires and their lay wing Regnum Christi, one has difficulty understanding the attraction of such a simplistic group and the man who founded it, a man expelled from two seminaries and turned down by six others. There is the sycophancy and careerism of the founder; "his way of distorting truth to gain power and fabricating a virtuous image out of pathological behaviour," his manipulation skills, his courting of the rich and his ability to separate them from their money, all under the guise of a traditional piety.

One can even understand the wealthy class' constant need for ecclesial benediction and even accept that there are some people who may be helped by a movement which is disturbingly like a cult, a Roman Catholic sect based on the fascist principles Maciel admired in Francisco Franco.

We might even understand some bishops plagued by empty seminaries. Here was an order fully sanctioned by John Paul II. But there was chaos in Atlanta, Ga. when Archbishop John Donoghue brought in the Legionaires.

The authors, Berry and Renner, write simply, "In Father Maciel, we confront a papal cover-up." This profoundly disturbing book begs for an honest Vatican inquiry. We see papal myopia at its worst. In his need to promote "clear church teaching" in what has come to be called "the Catholic restoration," John Paul II has put too many eggs in the basket of "a triumphal force; the militant spirituality of Opus Dei and the Legion." These "new movements" have never been able to connect with the vast majority of Catholics who were to be his spear-carriers in the new evangelization.

With Maciel, Pope John Paul has made a drastic mistake. With the Legion's penchant for catering to the rich and for embracing dictatorships like that of Pinochet in Chile, we see a huge disconnect between the poor man of Nazareth and a church trying to follow him.