George Weigel, Pope John Paul II biographer and a leading
conservative voice at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy
Center, has recently become a critic of the Legion of Christ, the
scandal-racked religious order, after years of supporting it while
dismissing complaints and charges against its founder, Fr. Marcial
Maciel Degollado.
Among high-profile U.S. Catholic conservatives who long
defended Maciel while denigrating his accusers, Weigel alone has made a
turnabout in urging Legion reforms.
However, he continues to go out of
his way, as he has for years, to excuse the late Pope John Paul II from
any culpability in the Legion scandal.
It was John Paul, more than
anyone else, who backed Maciel and the Legion and elevated both in
church status.
“I have been deeply impressed by the work of the Legionaries of
Christ in the United States, in Mexico, and in Rome,” Weigel wrote on a
Legion Web site in 2002.
“If Father Maciel and his charism as a founder
are to be judged by the fruits of his work, those fruits are most
impressive indeed.”
Published accusations against Maciel first surfaced
in 1997.
In a report coauthored by this writer in Conneticut’s Hartford
Courant, nine men, interviewed in the United States and Mexico, charged
that Maciel had molested them in Spain and Italy during the 1940s, ’50s
and ’60s.
Several said Maciel told them he had permission from Pope
Pius XII to seek them out sexually for relief of physical pain.
U.S.
Catholic conservative voices, including Catholic League president
William Donohue and political activist Deal Hudson, defended Maciel at
the time.
Other conservatives had offered their continued support for
the Legion founder. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, former U.S. Ambassador to
the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon, and CNN political analyst Bill Bennett
were among them.
Glendon, now a Harvard law professor, scoffed at “old
slanders” and in a letter dated May 23, 2002, called Maciel a man of
“radiant holiness.”
Weigel’s own endorsement came a month later. Both of their statements
followed the April 2002 meeting of the U.S. cardinals with John Paul in
Rome to discuss the abuse crisis. With clergy sex abuse receiving more
media coverage, it was a period in which Legion leaders wanted to shore
up Maciel’s reputation amid heavy scrutiny.
The defense of Maciel by
conservative Catholics gave valuable cover to Maciel as the Legion
struck back against the men from Mexico and Spain who had come forward
to relate that they had been sexually abused by Maciel when they were
teenage seminarians.
To say that Weigel, Glendon and Neuhaus — who
asserted Maciel’s innocence as “a moral certainty” — were duped is to
overstate the obvious. Clearly, they were influenced by John Paul’s own
personal support for Maciel.
A larger question is why not one of those supporters bothered to sit
down with the men who had accused Maciel, including Juan Vaca, the first
to come forward with charges in a document he sent to Pope Paul VI in
1976, or Fr. Felix Alarcón, or the other six survivors, to hear what
they had to say.
In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI banished Maciel from active
ministry.
One week after the Feb. 2, 2009, news that Maciel had led a double
life and had fathered a daughter, and after several priests quit the
Legion, Weigel posed questions about the Legion in an essay on the First
Things Web site, published by the conservative Institute on Religion
and Public Life in Washington.
Many people with friends among “Legionary priests have known for
years [that] there is great good here, as there is among the faithful
members of Regnum Christi,” Weigel wrote.
“How shall that good be
saved?”
He called for a “root-and-branch examination” and “a brutally
frank analysis of the institutional culture” by the Vatican.
“Can the
Legion be reformed from within, after those complicit in the Maciel web
of deceit have been dismissed?”
Sanitizing the past
Today Weigel is the leading conservative voice urging Legion reform.
Yet his demands for Vatican probity are preceded by a lengthy record of
whitewashing John Paul’s failure in the abuse crisis.
In two biographies
of the late pope, and in a 2002 book, The Courage to Be Catholic:
Crisis, Reform and the Future of the Church, Weigel’s treatment of the
abuse crisis is marred by his blindness to a host of early reports and
books on what sociologist Fr. Andrew M. Greeley called, in 1992, “the
greatest scandal in the history of religion in America.”
The first
volume of Weigel’s papal biography, in 1999, completely avoids the
issue. When the Boston scandal in 2002 forced John Paul to deal with it,
Weigel flew to Rome as an ad hoc papal advisor.
Weigel is the rare writer not in the Legion’s employ to get an
interview with Maciel. After the 1997 Hartford Courant report, Maciel
shunned journalists, even canceling a speech in Chicago for fear of
facing reporters. Weigel’s 2010 book, The End and the Beginning: Pope
John Paul II — the Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, notes
that he interviewed Maciel on Feb. 19, 1998. Weigel does not quote
Maciel, nor explain what he asked or what Maciel said, other than that
John Paul broke a “logjam in 1983″ for the approval of the Legion
constitutions.
John Paul “may well have been ill served by associates and
subordinates who ought to have been more alert to the implications of
[Maciel's] cult of personality,” writes Weigel.
“The reasons that those
associates and subordinates were skeptical of the charges will be
investigated and debated for years.”
This, from a writer who had 10
interviews with John Paul for the 1999 book and better access to curial
“associates” than most journalists at the Vatican.
“Despite the negative
implications of John Paul’s reputation that some of [his] critics
quickly drew,” Weigel writes, “what was at work in this scandalous
affair was deception in the service of the mysterium iniquitatis” — the
mystery of evil. And so we are left to believe that one of the great
moral leaders of the last century was deceived by the “mystery of evil.”
Vatican politics
Weigel airbrushes any reference to Vatican Secretary of State
Cardinal Angelo Sodano pressuring then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to halt
the Maciel prosecution from 1998 to 2004, and to the significant sums
of money that Maciel advanced to both Sodano and papal secretary
Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz (NCR, April 06, 2010).
Of Dziwisz, a
pivotal Maciel supporter, Weigel simply notes that the Polish prelate
was “susceptible to misreading personalities.” (Dziwisz has refused to
answer NCR questions.)
What made John Paul insist on praising Maciel for years after the
1998 canonical filing by ex-Legion victims at the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith? NCR’s John L. Allen Jr. reported in 2004 that
John Paul and his senior advisers simply did not believe the
accusations.
Yet no one in Vatican inner circle felt the moral urgency
to speak to Vaca or the seven other ex-Legionaries mentioned in the
doctrinal congregation case.
Heaping blame on Maciel is easy now: He’s dead.
Why did the Vatican
legal system break down?
Why did John Paul not demand a probe of Maciel?
The deeper mystery is why he could not bring himself to confront the
larger crisis Maciel personified.
In 1999, a year after his Maciel interview, Weigel published a
992-page papal biography. Witness to Hope chronicles John Paul’s life
from childhood and priesthood in Poland, under the Nazi darkness, then
communism, through the milestone events as pontiff with lucid analysis
of his philosophical, theological and political thinking.
Weigel credits
Maciel with helping to persuade the president of Mexico in 1979 to meet
John Paul at the airport on his first papal trip to Latin America.
Not
a word on the allegations against Maciel from 1997.
The book ignores
widely reported clergy abuse cases that rocked America and Ireland in
the 1990s: the charges that brought down Covenant House founder Fr.
Bruce Ritter; the resignation of Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe,
N.M., amid allegations from young women; the $119 million jury verdict
against the Dallas diocese in 1997 that was a subject of great
conversation in the Congregation for the Clergy, according to former
priest Christopher Kunze, who worked there at the time.
Were these not
issues for the pope?
Jonathan Kwitney’s biography Man of the Century: The Life and Times
of Pope John Paul II, published two years before Weigel’s, examines the
abuse scandals with a straightforward approach, faulting John Paul for
denial.
A former Wall Street Journal correspondent, Kwitney, now
deceased, wrote admiringly of John Paul’s geopolitical triumphs and
great pastoral gifts, yet with a moderately critical view of the pope’s
reaction to such internal church matters as celibacy and women’s
ordination.
Weigel wrote on the abuse issue in 1999: Recruitment to seminaries had plummeted in the developed world, and
seminaries themselves had experienced conditions ranging from confusion
to turmoil since Vatican II. Discipline among the clergy faltered, and
while statistical evidence demonstrated that malfeasance among Roman
Catholic priests was no more severe (in absolute and relative terms)
than among the clergy of other Christian denominations or among
professionals in society, scandals involving priests were evils in
themselves and another barrier to recruitment and reform within the
presbyterate.
The issue of whether the priesthood had a greater proportion of child
molesters than other denominations or professions had no consensus at
the time.
Nor does one exist today.
Weigel’s “evidence” source was
Philip Jenkins’ Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary
Crisis, a 1996 book based on secondary sources rather than church files
unearthed by discovery subpoenas.
Jenkins argued that the 1990s scandals
were a construction of the media, abetted by liberal Catholics, notably
Dominican Fr. Tom Doyle, who became an advocate for victims of clergy
sex abuse, and Greeley.
Jenkins’ theory collapsed in the 2002 media
coverage that revealed bishops had concealed child molesters in many
dioceses. Jenkins works as an expert witness for dioceses facing abuse
cases; according to his own sworn testimony, he charges $450 per hour.
Weigel implies that John Paul was not properly briefed in the 1990s.
Were the papal nuncios in Washington and in Dublin, Ireland, censoring
their diplomatic cables home? In March 1985, Doyle was a canonist
working in the Vatican Embassy.
“I prepared a 42-page detailed report
explaining the issue in graphic details,” he told NCR.
“My boss, the
papal nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, signed it. The document was
personally given by [Philadelphia] Cardinal John Krol to the pope. I
distinctly recall Laghi saying many times that ‘my superiors in Rome’
said this or that in response. There was a great deal of telephone
traffic about it too.”
In 1989 the American bishops sent canon lawyers
to Rome, seeking the authority to defrock pedophiles without going
through the long wait for such decisions from the pope. John Paul said
no.
Kwitney reports that John Paul was resistant to judging priests.
In April 2002, as The Boston Globe reports ignited international news
coverage damaging to the Vatican, Weigel as an adviser to John Paul in
Rome was quoted in the press.
John Paul, in deteriorating health from
Parkinson’s disease, summoned the American cardinals to discuss the
crisis.
Several high-ranking cardinals and canonists defended church
secrecy, impugning the media for anti-Catholic bias.
Later that year,
Weigel published The Courage to Be Catholic, and wrote scornfully of
Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos’ blunders at a press conference: “Some
suggested that the cardinal’s wooden performance had something to do
with his alleged papal ambitions.”
But as Weigel took the curia to task,
he was filling holes in the 1999 biography. Weigel blamed the Vatican
bureaucracy for failing to keep the pope advised.
Although the Holy See
had a sophisticated Web site and the Vatican Press Office disseminated
daily news digests of papal activities by e-mail, Weigel wrote:
The church in the United States expected that the Vatican was
living through the American Catholic trauma of early 2002 in real time
through adequate information from the Washington nunciature. The Vatican
wasn’t, because the Vatican is simply not part of the Internet culture
and the information flow from Washington was inadequate. That created an
expectations gap that widened and deepened during the first three
months of the crisis.
The “expectations gap” had nothing to do with the Internet; it had
been building since at least 1989 when the U.S. bishops failed to get
permission from John Paul to laicize pedophiles.
As a decade of scandals
followed, John Paul was largely silent, particularly at the 1995
resignation of Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Vienna, whose sexual
transgressions with youths provoked a scandal in Austria.
John Paul had
plucked Groër from obscurity to become an archbishop.
For Weigel, “the crisis” begins in 2002, a position consistent with
its absence from his 1999 John Paul biography.
The 2002 book cites a
litany of scandals, including gay seminarians dancing at the North
American College in Rome.
Weigel decries a loss of orthodox bearings.
He
does not spare bishops: “Episcopal misgovernance came in many forms:
bishops who took a cavalier attitude toward sexual abuse; bishops who
knowingly transferred sexual abusers … who misled other bishops about
known sexual abusers; bishops who saw the crisis of clerical sexual
abuse in primarily legal and financial terms … bishops who failed to
clean up their seminaries.”
John Paul appointed many of those bishops.
The vetting process, which
excluded lay involvement, eliminated any candidate for the episcopacy
who had endorsed optional celibacy or women priests.
The gay subculture
Weigel scorns arose as thousands of men left the priesthood to marry
after Pope Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, in which
he called celibacy the church’s “brilliant jewel.”
Weigel ignores a substantial body of work on clerical life from the
1970s and 1980s by Greeley, psychologist Eugene Kennedy, author A.W.
Richard Sipe, and the late psychiatrist Conrad Baars, who delivered a
1971 report at the Vatican, “The Role of the Church in the Causation,
Treatment and Prevention of the Crisis in the Priesthood.”
Weigel ignores a longstanding body of literature by these and other
Catholic social scientists on the symptoms of crisis, even pathology, in
clerical culture.
“The deepest root of the crisis of episcopal
misgovernance,” wrote Weigel, “is theological. Too many bishops in the
United States have traded the rich evangelical, pastoral and
sacramental patrimony that is theirs for the mess of pottage that is
contemporary management theory.”
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[Jason Berry is an author and producer of a film documentary on
Maciel, "Vows of Silence." The Investigative Fund of the Nation
Institute provided support for this article.]
SIC: NCR/IT'L