OPINION | Pope Benedict XVI, the 265th pope of the Catholic Church, was a hard-line conservative who tried to root out corruption and abuse—but retreated from the battle when it mattered most.
Then-Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano—the most powerful man next to John Paul in the pope’s long decline from neurological disease—pressured Ratzinger to abort the case. Six years passed. In November 2004, Sodano orchestrated a lavish celebration of Maciel’s 60th anniversary as a priest. John Paul, who would die five months later, praised the Legionary, despite numerous media accounts on the accusations. Sodano had once toldthat the Roman Curia “is a brotherhood.
Maciel had long courted potentates like Carlos Slim of Mexico and William Casey, President Ronald Reagan’s CIA director who endowed a building on the order’s Cheshire, Connecticut campus. Joseph Ratzinger in the Academy of Sciences, moral and politic in Paris, France on November 08, 1992.Norma and Normita joined the priests keeping vigil at the Jacksonville condo when Maciel died in 2008. The Legion announced that he had gone to heaven.
The Legion coverup of Maciel’s progeny continued for a year after his death, a time in which the Legion kept affirming its obedience to Benedict, without any admission that Nuestro Padre had abused anyone—a strategy that called into question the pope’s very dismissal of Maciel. Though he would not sanction an intervention of the Legionaries, Benedict did order Legion superiors to negotiate settlements with abused ex-Legionaries—to my knowledge, a breakthrough position for a pope in a church which by then had paid out billions in U.S. court cases. Yet Benedict backed away from mounting evidence of the cult tactics that shaped the Legionaries’ behavior, letting the late Cardinal DePaolis “reform” the religious order.