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	A Vast Sex and Money Scandal Threatens the Vatican. But, Once Again, Ratzinger Emerges As the Campaigner against "Filth" By Damian Thompson Telegraph April 6, 2010 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100032982/a-vast-sex-and-money-scandal-threatens-the-vatican-but-once-again-ratzinger-emerges-as-the-campaigner-against-filth/ If you visit the website of the National Catholic Reporter you will find a story of Vatican skulduggery to make you gasp. It involves the Legionaries of Christ, a priestly order founded by the late Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado, a Mexican paedophile priest who used its money to pay off his young male victims and the mothers of his illegitimate children. This much we knew. But the NCR, an American paper whose Leftist bias usually rules it out as a source of impartial information, has done some digging into the finances of the Legionaries and their lay arm, Regnum Christi, and uncovered wrongdoing on an astonishing scale. Maciel did not rip off the Church. On the contrary, as Jason Berry reports: Maciel [who died in disgrace aged 87 in 2008] left a trail of wreckage among his followers. Moreover, in a gilded irony for Benedict – who prosecuted him despite pressure from Maciel’s chief supporter, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006 – Maciel left an ecclesiastical empire with which the church must now contend. The Italian newsweekly L’espresso estimates the Legion’s assets at 25 billion euros, with a $650 million annual budget, according to The Wall Street Journal. The order numbered 700 priests and 1,300 seminarians in 2008. On March 15 of this year, five bishops, called visitators, from as many countries, delivered their reports to the pope after a seven-month investigation. A final report is expected by the end of April. Twenty-five billion euros! This old pervert was the most effective fundraiser in the history of the Church – and the most crooked since Judas Iscariot. This is a shocking mess for Pope Benedict XVI to sort out. Yet, in the case of Maciel, he can do so with a clear conscience, unlike so many of the grasping idiots who surrounded his predecessor, Pope John Paul II (who, it must be said, was too old and ill to comprehend the charges against Maciel that were beginning to surface at the end of his papacy). The NCR can’t stand Pope Benedict, but it does reveal that Cardinal Ratzinger refused the “donations” (charitable bribes) that the Legion sucessfully pressed on other senior Vatican clergy, sometimes to gain access to John Paul II: In 1997 [Ratzinger] gave a lecture on theology to Legionaries. When a Legionary handed him an envelope, saying it was for his charitable use, Ratzinger refused. “He was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said.A few years later, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who ignored John Paul’s wishes and moved against against Maciel, to the fury of the latter’s allies, who included Cardinal Angelo Sodano and John Paul’s secretary, Msgr (now Cardinal) Stanislaw Dziwisz. In 2004, John Paul – ignoring the canon law charges against Maciel – honored him in a Vatican ceremony in which he entrusted the Legion with the administration of Jerusalem’s Notre Dame Center, an education and conference facility. The following week, Ratzinger took it on himself to authorize an investigation of Maciel. The Vatican’s old boy network tried to do what it did in the case of the pervert Cardinal Groer of Vienna in the late 1990s, when Cardinal Ratzinger was blocked from instituting a thorough investigation. But in 2005, as more allegations surfaced against the Legion – many of whose leaders were almost as rotten as their founder, though ordinary members were unaware of this – Ratzinger was elected Pope. In 2006, he punished the very frail, drug-addicted Maciel by sending him into exile in disgrace – a not unreasonable decision, since the old man wouldn’t have lived long enough to face a criminal trial lasting years. He then ordered the most thorough investigation of a Catholic organisation in the Church’s history, scheduled to conclude this month. Meanwhile, the stonewalling by the Legion’s Vatican defenders continues. This is what Benedict XVI is up against in his campaign to root out corruption from the Church and bring horribly delayed justice to the victims of abuse. His reforms – which are in a subtle way connected to his renovation of Catholic worship – will take up the rest of his pontificate. But I think he may have guessed as much when he accepted the decision of the conclave five years ago. And what a good decision it was.
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