Blessed John Paul II’s 2004 meeting with and praise of the founder of
the Legionaries of Christ, who later was banished to a life of penance
because of sexual abuse, was a mistake, said the late Pope’s longtime
secretary.
“The Holy Father should not have received that individual,” said
Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, who served as personal
secretary to the former Pope for 39 years.
In a new book, Ho Vissuto con un Santo (I Lived with a Saint),
released in early November, Cardinal Dziwisz said the meeting was just
one example of a serious lack of communication in the Roman Curia, which
Blessed John Paul tried, largely without success, to reform.
Although rumours had been circulating for years that the Legion’s
founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, had sexually abused
seminarians, Cardinal Dziwisz said, “When the Holy Father met him, he
knew nothing, absolutely nothing. For him, he was still the founder of a
great religious order and that’s it. No one had told him anything, not
even about the rumours going around.”
“Unfortunately,” the cardinal said, “it was the consequence of a
still extremely bureaucratic structure” where important information was
not always shared.
A similar lack of communication, he said, led to retired Benedict XVI
lifting the excommunication of traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson
in 2009 before finding out the bishop was a Holocaust denier when “it
would have been enough to check the internet” to discover it.
After John Paul II was elected in 1978, the first non-Italian Pope in
more than 450 years, he said, “some in the Curia called him ‘the Polish
Pope,’ and I don’t think they meant it in a positive way.”
The late Pope tried to reform the Curia, but did not succeed,
Cardinal Dziwisz said. “Maybe the Curia wasn’t ready to accept a reform
that would return it to an effective function of service to the pope and
the bishops, and, therefore, to being an authentic instrument of
communion between the Holy See and local churches.”
Cardinal Dziwisz, who participated in the conclave that elected Pope
Francis in March, said that in their pre-conclave meetings the cardinals
discussed the urgent need to reform the Curia.
Pope Francis “already
has made important decisions and launched a series of initiatives that
are sure to bring big changes to the curial structure and to relations
between the Roman Curia and the local churches,” he said.
The Polish cardinal also addressed criticisms by victims of clerical
sexual abuse and some media, who believe Blessed John Paul did not do
enough to protect victims and punish guilty priests. In the book,
presented as a “conversation” with Italian journalist Gian Franco
Svidercoschi, Cardinal Dziwisz said, “from the moment the scandal
erupted, especially in the United States, there was perfect agreement
between John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in confronting the problem”
and in deciding to transfer the cases from local dioceses to the
congregation.
“I find it insulting, I repeat, insulting,” Cardinal Dziwisz said,
“that some people continue to put John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger,
first as congregation prefect, then as Pope, in opposition on this
question, attributing to one or the other a desire to cover up this
horrible plague.”
Cardinal Dziwisz not only served as the Pope’s personal secretary
throughout his almost 27-year pontificate, but was his secretary in
Krakow, had been a student of the then-Father Karol Wojtyla in the
seminary and was ordained to the priesthood by him in 1963.
“I was convinced he was a saint from the moment Father Wojtyla was my
seminary professor,” he said. “This conviction was reinforced with the
passage of time, living alongside him first in Krakow, then at the
Vatican.”