{"id":402,"date":"2018-12-09T01:49:53","date_gmt":"2018-12-08T17:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesus4lesbians.com\/?p=402"},"modified":"2018-12-24T22:12:06","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T14:12:06","slug":"the-shame-of-john-paul-ii-pope-benedict-allows-cover-up-in-canonization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/Jesus4lesbians.com\/?p=402","title":{"rendered":"The shame of John Paul II: Pope Benedict allows cover-up in canonization"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Shame of John Paul II: How the Sex Abuse Scandal Stained His Papacy<\/h1>\n

The pope failed to take decisive action in response to clear evidence of a criminal underground in the priesthood.<\/p>\n

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By Jason Berry<\/a><\/h2>\n

April 27, 2011<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute assisted in a section of this article, drawn from\u00a0Jason Berry\u2019s <\/em>Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, to be published June 7 by Crown.<\/em><\/p>\n

On May 1, Pope Benedict XVI will beatify his predecessor, John Paul II, at a huge ceremony in St. Peter\u2019s Square in Rome. Beatification, the final step before canonization, or sainthood, ennobles the deceased as \u201cblessed,\u201d or worthy of veneration. Authorities have prepared for a million visitors to the weekend events.<\/p>\n

Most beatification cases are decided decades after the person dies\u2014a sign of Vatican probity on whether a life achievement, nominated by religious colleagues, merits a path to sainthood. The timetable is at the pope\u2019s discretion. In this case, Benedict\u2019s decision to fast-track John Paul\u2019s case has drawn a chorus of criticism from prominent Catholics and survivors of sexual abuse by clergy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Should a pope who turned his back on the worst crisis in modern Catholic history be exalted as a saint? Lawsuits by victims, numerous prosecutions and news coverage of bishops who enabled abuse are the shadow story of John Paul\u2019s twenty-six-year pontificate, during which time he responded to continuing allegations of clergy abuse with denial and inertia. American dioceses and religious orders alone have spent nearly $2 billion on legal actions and treatment of sex offenders, an aching scandal at incalculable cost to the church\u2019s stature.<\/p>\n

John Paul II has been widely hailed as a commanding figure on the global stage, a catalyst in the fall of Soviet Communism and a champion of human rights. His stirring homilies on freedom in his first papal trip back to Poland in 1979 galvanized the Solidarity union movement. On his 1987 trip to Chile, during the Pinochet dictatorship, John Paul said Mass for a vast throng and \u201cpresented speaker after speaker who complained of censorship, torture, and political murder,\u201d wrote Jonathan Kwitny in his 1997 biography Man of the Century<\/em>. John Paul\u2019s trip was a turning point in Chile\u2019s transition to democracy. On the other hand, the pope looked askance at liberation theology, believing the Latin American grassroots movement to be an extension of the Marxism that had subjugated Poland. And he was conflicted on the role of progressive Latin American clergy who were allied with the poor and resisted persecution by death squads.<\/p>\n

Moreover, on the greatest internal crisis facing the church, the pope failed, time and again, to take decisive action in response to clear evidence of a criminal underground in the priesthood, a subculture that sexually traumatized tens of thousands of youngsters. Despite a 1984 warning memo from the Rev. Thomas Doyle, then a canon lawyer in the Vatican Embassy in Washington, and a ninety-three-page report on the problem co-written by Doyle in 1985, which was sent to every American bishop, John Paul ordered no outreach to victims, no binding policy to rid the priesthood of deviants. In 1989 the US conference of bishops sent experts in canon law to Rome, seeking a streamlined process for defrocking child molesters rather than waiting for the byzantine Vatican bureaucracy and final word from the pope. John Paul refused. Litigation and prosecutions spread, but the pope remained passive.<\/p>\n

As victim-survivors found their way to lawyers, a train of legal discovery in the United States, Ireland and other countries yielded documents linking complicit bishops, religious-order superiors and Vatican officials in the concealment of sex offenders. On April 21 in an important lawsuit against the Vatican by a man who was abused by a predator priest, a federal district court in Portland, Oregon, ordered church officials in Rome to turn over documents for discovery. District Judge Michael Mosman said, \u201cPlaintiff has proffered evidence that tends to show the Holy See knew of [the priest\u2019s] propensities and that in some cases, the Holy See exercised direct control over the conduct, placement, and removal of individual priests accused of similar sexual misconduct.\u201d The US Supreme Court declined to hear the Holy See\u2019s appeal for dismissal, which was based on a claim of sovereign immunity.<\/p>\n

On John Paul\u2019s role in the church\u2019s long nightmare, the Rev. Richard McBrien, a distinguished University of Notre Dame theologian, wrote, \u201cIndeed, he had a terrible record, full of denial and foot-dragging<\/span>, on the greatest crisis to confront the Catholic Church since the Reformation of the 16th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Paul\u2019s beatification may give a media boost to the Vatican, but Pope Benedict\u2019s negligence earlier in his career has also done severe damage to the papacy; media coverage last year spotlighted how Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as Benedict was then known, failed to dismiss several known abusers.<\/span> How can any pope be a voice for peace, proclaim the sanctity of life and speak for human rights while giving de facto Vatican immunity to bishops and cardinals who concealed child molesters? John Paul bequeathed a quagmire to Benedict: an archaic tradition of Vatican tribunals subservient to bishops and high church officials.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Indeed, the Vatican has a dysfunctional justice system. Consider the case of Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned as Boston archbishop in 2002 amid a Boston Globe<\/em> investigation reporting allegations of more than ninety clergy perpetrators under his authority. That number has grown to 204, according to BishopAccountability.org, an online archive on the church crisis. In May 2004 the archdiocese, facing a $4 million deficit and a $37 million loan to repay, announced a wave of parish closings to make up the shortfall. The next day came news that Law was bound for Rome to become pastor of the historic basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, with an estimated $12,000 monthly salary, according to the New York Times<\/em>. He now sits on the Vatican\u2019s board of the Congregation for Bishops, which chooses new bishops.<\/p>\n

In a subtle, indirect way, the Vatican signaled its realization that the abuse crisis would have posed serious problems for John Paul\u2019s beatification if his overall record had been considered. On April 1 the Catholic News Service reported from Rome, \u201cPope John Paul II is being beatified not because of his impact on history or on the Catholic Church, but because of the way he lived the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, said Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for Saints\u2019 Causes.<\/span>\u201d<\/p>\n

What thick irony. Clearly, John Paul was one of history\u2019s great popes. As an evangelist he visited 129 countries, more than all previous popes combined. He canonized more saints than all of his predecessors. A staunch traditionalist on sexual issues and theology, he nevertheless emphasized human rights as a political value. In making personal piety a standard for sainthood, the Vatican is restricting scrutiny of John Paul\u2019s record in order to whitewash embarrassing information about his greatest failure.<\/p>\n

John Paul is not the only former pope about whom this is a burning issue. Many Jewish leaders as well as Catholics oppose a Vatican move to canonize Pius XII, citing his wartime reticence on Nazi atrocities. Although recent scholarship has found that Pius took some initiatives to help Jews avoid death camps, his silence in the face of Hitler\u2019s crimes is a human rights issue. Moral justice is a force in historical memory; we cannot change the past, but we must account for those who had power yet failed to forcefully resist great evil.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s John Paul began to make a famous series of apologies for past church sins, particularly anti-Semitism, calling for \u201cpurification of the historical memory.\u201d He apologized for church racism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, to Galileo, and to Indians\u2014a stirring line of atonement. But he did not include children abused by priests.<\/span> Finally, after extensive media coverage in the United States, Canada, Australia and Ireland, he did voice concern for victims\u2014but he also scolded the media, accusing them of sensationalism. John Paul\u2019s myopia stemmed from a chivalrous idea of religious life, born of his years as the leader of a Polish church that functioned in opposition to the Communist regime. Under such harsh conditions, he considered church unity paramount, and he saw that unity vindicated when the Iron Curtain fell.<\/p>\n

In April 2002, as coverage of the scandals hit critical mass, an ailing John Paul, bloated from treatment for Parkinson\u2019s disease, summoned the American cardinals to Rome. Reading a statement for cameras, the pope called clergy abuse \u201can appalling sin\u201d and said the priesthood had no room for such men; he also called on \u201cthe power of Christian conversion,\u201d implying redemption for sex offenders. Instead of promulgating a clear policy on defrocking abusers, he absolved the bishops of their \u201cgeneralized lack of knowledge,\u201d faulting \u201cthe advice of clinical experts.\u201d He thus put the blame on therapists rather than on the bishops who recycled child molesters.<\/span><\/p>\n

In June 2002 the US Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a youth protection charter, declaring \u201czero tolerance\u201d for any cleric who abuses a child. The charter sparked important preventive training in Catholic schools; bishops removed hundreds of predators who had evaded prosecution. But the charter lacks enforcement teeth, as revealed by recent news from Philadelphia, where twenty-one priests were removed and four others indicted only after a stinging grand jury report. And the charter has no oversight of bishops or cardinals. Despite its flaws the charter does represent progress, and yet the Vatican itself still has nothing comparable to it.<\/p>\n

Bishops look to the pope for leadership. But in the worst scandal of his papacy, John Paul ignored serious allegations of abuse against Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the archconservative religious order known as the Legion of Christ. In fact, the pope defiantly praised the long-accused pedophile for six years after a group of Maciel\u2019s victims filed a canon law case in 1998. The group sought his excommunication before Cardinal Ratzinger\u2019s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was gradually assuming control over such proceedings.<\/p>\n

Born in Mexico in 1920, Maciel founded the order in 1941. The Legion was based on papal loyalty, and John Paul returned the favor by giving it strong support during his papacy\u2014a natural alliance, given that he shared the order\u2019s militant anticommunism and its struggle to save the church from liberal drift, particularly liberation theology. John Paul saw young Legionaries, marching in pairs with short haircuts and double-breasted coats, as a sign of resurgent orthodoxy, of a church triumphant after the 1930s anticlerical violence in Mexico and postwar Communist persecution of the Polish church.<\/p>\n

Maciel did advance work on John Paul\u2019s 1979 trip to Mexico, a year after Juan Vaca, a former Legion priest, sent the Vatican a list of twenty of Maciel\u2019s victims, including himself. Nothing happened. Vaca wrote again in 1989, including a long personal letter to the pope, again to no avail.<\/p>\n

The greatest fundraiser of the modern church, Maciel targeted wealthy conservatives, singling out widows and wives of powerful men. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim was a Legion benefactor, as was William Casey, CIA director under Ronald Reagan. Casey and his wife funded a building on the Legion campus in Cheshire, Connecticut. Footage of Maciel and John Paul was pivotal to Legion fundraising, with the Legion sending VHS cassettes to targeted donors. One shows John Paul in 1993 at the balcony above St. Peter\u2019s Square, telling crowds, \u201cYou are all sons and daughters of Father Maciel!\u201d<\/span> A 1994 papal letter the Legion placed in Mexican daily papers called Maciel \u201can efficacious guide to youth.\u201d Maciel worked his donor base with constant travel. By 2006, with only 650 priests and 2,500 seminarians (the Jesuits had 16,000), the Legion had a $650 million budget, according to the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, and a network of schools and colleges in Europe, Latin America and the United States\u2014twenty-four elite prep schools in America alone.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0*\u00a0*<\/p>\n

On February 23, 1997, Gerald Renner and I published an investigation in the Hartford Courant<\/em> of Maciel with on-the-record accounts by two Spaniards and seven Mexicans who accused him of abusing them when they were seminarians in Spain and Rome in the 1950s and \u201960s. Boys cut off from family, awed by the charismatic leader called Nuestro Padre, they were stunned by his morphine addiction, bewildered as he whispered claims of his permission from Pius XII for sexual activity because of chronic pain<\/span>. Maciel refused to be interviewed, but claimed innocence in a statement. The Vatican refused to make any comment.<\/p>\n

William Donohue of the Catholic League responded immediately with a letter to the Courant<\/em>, scoffing at the allegations. The order set up a website, LegionaryFacts, which charged the accusers\u2014and us\u2014with fomenting a conspiracy against Maciel. Father Richard John Neuhaus, an influential Catholic conservative and editor of the journal First Things<\/em>, called the accusations \u201cscurrilous\u201d and proclaimed Maciel\u2019s innocence \u201ca moral certainty.\u201d<\/span> William Bennett, a national lecturer on ethics who later became a CNN analyst, also voiced support for the Legion. Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who lectured at the Legion university in Rome, derided the accusations and praised Maciel\u2019s \u201cradiant holiness.\u201d George Weigel, a biographer of John Paul, weighed in for the Legion, too. These conservatives were in the pope\u2019s corner: in the fall of 1997 John Paul had appointed Maciel to an important religious conference in Rome.<\/p>\n

In October 1998 Jos\u00e9 Barba and another ex-Legionary who had been abused by Maciel flew to Rome. After leaving the Legion as a young man in 1962, Barba earned a doctorate from Harvard in Latin American studies and is now a professor at ITAM, a major university in Mexico City. On behalf of the nine men<\/span> who had gone public in the Courant<\/em> about Maciel\u2019s abuse of them, Barba hired Martha Wegan, an Austrian canon lawyer in Rome who practiced in Vatican tribunals. Wegan filed a canonical grievance in 1998 seeking Maciel\u2019s excommunication by Ratzinger\u2019s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the church\u2019s monarchical system, the pope is the supreme arbiter of canon law. He can halt, reverse or remove any proceeding. Maciel had a powerful Vatican ally in Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state, an office analogous to prime minister. In a 1999 letter to her clients, Wegan reported that the case had been tabled \u201cfor the time being\u2026. In such a delicate situation, time must be allowed to play its role.\u201d Barba explains, \u201cWegan told me for the first time\u2014and to my enormous surprise\u2014that Cardinal Angelo Sodano had pressed so that Cardinal Ratzinger wouldn\u2019t proceed ahead with our case<\/span>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ratzinger, a moral absolutist<\/span> who had persecuted liberal theologians, realized that the absence of a central system to defrock abusers was hurting the church. So in 2001 he persuaded John Paul to consolidate that authority in Ratzinger\u2019s office\u2014a move for which no one in the Roman Curia envied him. But by then, Maciel had spent heavily on favors to Vatican officials to insulate himself from punishment.<\/p>\n

Sodano\u2019s nephew, Andrea, worked on construction of a Legion university in Rome. \u201cCardinal Sodano helped change the zoning requirements to build the university,\u201d says Glenn Favreau, a former seminarian who worked under Maciel before leaving the order in 1997. As I reported in the National Catholic Reporter<\/em> last year, two priests on the project told Maciel that Andrea\u2019s work was inadequate. \u201cPay him! You pay him!\u201d Maciel is said to have yelled. Indeed they did.<\/p>\n

Maciel approved cash gifts of $5,000 and $10,000 to Cardinal Sodano, according to these priests, former Legionaries who spoke on background for my article. They say Maciel ordered cash envelopes of $2,500 to $5,000 to cardinals who said Mass at Legion events. And they say he offered a Mercedes to the late Cardinal Pio Laghi, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, seeking the highest Vatican rank for the new university. Laghi spurned the offer. There has been no rebuttal to these allegations, and neither the Legion nor the Vatican has responded directly to the charges.<\/p>\n

Maciel spared no expense in hosting events for church officials at the Legion center. \u201cSodano came over with his entire family, 200 of them, for a big meal when he was named a cardinal. And we fed them all,\u201d recalls ex-seminarian Favreau, now an attorney in Washington, DC. \u201cWhen Sodano became secretary of state, there was another celebration.\u201d Sodano declined my interview requests.<\/p>\n

The man closest to John Paul was his Polish-born secretary, Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz. Dziwisz oversaw the guest list of those given the rare privilege of attending the pope\u2019s early Mass\u2014British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his family, for example. Two priests who left the Legion and who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions from the Vatican told me in detailed interviews how Maciel supporters paid Dziwisz for the privilege. \u201cA wealthy family from Mexico,\u201d recounted one priest, \u201cgave Dziwisz $50,000.\u201d This was in 1997, after Maciel was accused by Barba and the other men in the Hartford<\/em> Courant <\/em>article. The priest spoke of many such transactions with Dziwisz. \u201cIt was always cash. And in dollars,\u201d he said. Maciel pulled out the stops for a grand reception honoring Dziwisz when he became a bishop.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0*\u00a0*<\/p>\n

A second priest who steered Legion patrons\u2019 money to Dziwisz said, \u201cThe expression [in Rome] is opere de carit\u00e0<\/em>: \u2018We\u2019re making an offering for your works of charity.\u2019 In fact, you don\u2019t know where the money is going. It\u2019s an elegant way of giving a bribe.\u201d As the abuse accusations against Maciel became known, the priest told me he \u201cwoke up and asked: Am I giving my life to serve God, or one man who had his problems? It was not worth consecrating myself to Maciel.\u201d Both men left the Legion in disgust, though both remained priests. \u201cMaciel wanted to buy power,\u201d said the first cleric. \u201c[Legion] superiors lie about money\u2014where it comes from, where it goes, how it\u2019s given.\u201d Dziwisz, now a cardinal in Krakow, refused to be interviewed.<\/p>\n

According to the first priest, Ratzinger gave a theology lecture at the Legion complex but refused an envelope with money.<\/p>\n

In 2002 ABC reporter Brian Ross approached Ratzinger in front of his waiting limousine and asked about Maciel. A flustered Ratzinger slapped Ross\u2019s hand and said, \u201cCome to me when the moment is given\u2014not yet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In late November 2004, with a beaming Sodano onstage, Maciel won praise yet again from John Paul, who had six months to live. By then Ratzinger realized that the next pope, whoever he might be, would be yoked to a scandal if the case languished; he ordered a canon lawyer on his staff, Charles Scicluna, to investigate. Among the many people who gave testimony to Scicluna in Rome, New York and Mexico City, thirty aging men told him about how Maciel abused them in seminary and about his morphine addiction.<\/span> In 2006, the year after Ratzinger became Pope Benedict, the Vatican ordered Maciel out of active ministry for \u201ca life of prayer and penance.\u201d Maciel went to his birthplace in southwest Mexico\u2014and a reunion with his daughter and her mother, a paramour from Acapulco. Photographs of them surfaced last year in a Mexican gossip magazine, two years after Maciel\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

In 2008 upon Maciel\u2019s burial in Mexico\u2014far from the grand tomb he\u2019d built for himself in a basilica he had erected in Rome, anticipating his own canonization\u2014the Legion website announced that the founder had gone to heaven. In 2010, after news of the daughter broke, the Legion apologized to its followers and, finally, to Maciel\u2019s victims. Two grown sons of Maciel also came forward, alleging incest. In a move without precedent in modern church history, Benedict ordered an investigation of the entire religious order.<\/span> The Vatican has since taken over the Legion in a kind of receivership.<\/p>\n

The LegionaryFacts website disappeared after Maciel\u2019s 2006 punishment; none of the conservative ideologues who had so staunchly defended him apologized to the victims, though George Weigel, who has a research chair at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, called for a Vatican investigation of the Legion in 2009.<\/p>\n

Weigel got ten interviews with John Paul for his 992-page biography Witness to Hope<\/em> (1999), which all but ignores the abuse crisis. Kwitny\u2019s 1997 biography faults John Paul on that front, in an otherwise favorable portrait. Weigel\u2019s 2010 sequel, The End of the Beginning: Pope John Paul II\u2014the Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy<\/em>, suggests that the pope had \u201cinadequate\u201d information. John Paul, he intones, was \u201c<\/span>ill served by associates and subordinates who ought to have been more alert to the implications of [Maciel\u2019s] cult of personality<\/span>\u2026. Despite the negative implications of John Paul\u2019s reputation that some of [his] critics quickly drew, what was at work in this scandalous affair was deception in the service of the mysterium iniquitatis\u201d\u2014the mystery of evil. That\u2019s it, folks. The pope who took on the Soviet empire was duped by the \u201cmystery of evil.\u201d Nothing about Sodano pressuring Ratzinger. Dziwisz, Weigel concludes, \u201cwas \u201csusceptible to misreading personalities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBeatification is a bitter pill for clergy victims because of John Paul II\u2019s record of protecting abusers and neglecting victims,\u201d states Terence McKiernan, co-director of BishopAccountability\u2028.org. \u201cJohn Paul received many letters from sexual victims which he simply ignored.\u201d But apparently bad times must be forgotten now, as the media machinery focuses on the beatification<\/span>. Since the 1990s, at least sixteen bishops and one cardinal (the late Hans Hermann Groer of Austria) abused children, \u201cstepped down\u201d and yet remained bishops in title. As Weigel now sings history for NBC, ceremonies will include Cardinal Dziwisz, Angelo Sodano (now dean of the College of Cardinals) and his successor as secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. Bertone, while archbishop of Genoa in 2003, wrote a glowing introduction to Maciel\u2019s as-told-to memoir Christ Is My Life<\/em>. If Bertone wasn\u2019t paid he should have been, since he served as a canon lawyer for Ratzinger in the years when the Maciel case sat stale.<\/p>\n

The beatification will include a French nun whose neurological illness was reportedly cured by a miraculous intervention after prayers to John Paul. This is sure to draw derision in some corners, but miracles are embedded in church history, and if the spirit of John Paul has healing power, we are a better world for it. The agony of Catholicism, however, calls for another healing\u2014that of truth brought to bear on ecclesial powers, robed in shame, dripping with hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

Saint Augustine put it well in City of God<\/em>: \u201cJustice is that virtue which gives everyone his due.\u201d\u00a0 (source<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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