Cardinal Dziwisz on Maciel: A very limited history

UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Tom Roberts | Nov. 6, 2013 NCR Today

Pope John Paul II’s former secretary, in a recently published book, defends his late boss’s promotion of the now-infamous Marciel Maciel Degollado by saying that the pope knew “absolutely nothing” about him because of a lack of communication among the curia.

According to a CNS report by Cindy Wooden, Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, personal secretary to the late John Paul for 39 years, said in his book, Hi Vissuto con un Santo (I Lived with a Saint), that the pope should not have met with and praised the founder of the ultra conservative and secretive order, the Legion of Christ, in 2004. ”When the Holy Father met him, he knew nothing, absolutely nothing. For him, he [Maciel] was still the founder of a great religious order and that’s it. No one had told him anything, not even about the rumors going around.” The ignorance, he further explains “was the consequence of a still extremely bureaucratic structure” in which there was little communication.

I have not read the book, which is currently available only in Italian. Perhaps Dziwisz provides more explanation and context in the book, but on the face of the information provided in the CNS story, which gives the impression of a single meeting between the two in 2004, a great deal of history is left out.

The record on Maciel, who, according to the Vatican, abused “more than 20 but fewer than 100” of his former seminarians and who, it was ultimate discovered, had at least three children by two different women, is voluminous. Much of it was generated by journalist Jason Berry for NCR.

But the record extends back to initial stories by Berry and Gerald Renner, then a religion reporter for the Hartford Courant. In February, 1997, the two published an extensively documented story in the Courant, based on on-the-record interviews with nine former seminarians or ex-Legion priests, detailing a history of sexual abuse of seminarians by Maciel. Apparently the news either did not get to the pope or he chose to ignore the allegations.

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