Vows of Silence by Jason Berry & Gerald Renner

Author:Jason Berry & Gerald Renner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

The Vatican Steps In

The Legion’s 1991 history omits any reference to the Vatican investigation between 1956 and 1958. Within the Legion, that time is called “the War.” Maciel more recently calls it the “Great Blessing.” Indeed it was a war: a war against internal enemies.

Federico Dominguez, the Spanish seminarian who handled Maciel’s correspondence, had watched his injections of painkilling drugs and knew the man was in trouble. 32 On a trip to Mexico in 1955, Domínguez became alarmed at Maciel’s constant contact with young boys at the seminary in Tlalpan. He confided his suspicions to Father Luis Ferreira Correa, the Legion’s director of the school. Ferreira had heard confessions of the seminarians. Canon law forbids a priest from disclosing anything he hears in confession, but Ferreira could encourage such youths to speak with a superior. Dominguez sought the counsel of a Benedictine priest, Gregorio Lemercier, at the Monastery of the Resurrection in Santa Maria Ahuacatitlán near Cuernavaca, in late December of 1955. Lemercier then met with Ferreira and told both men to write the Vatican. In the meantime, an older Legion seminarian in Rome was passing information to the Curia. 33 The complaints landed at the Congregation of Religious, headed by Cardinal Valerio Valeri, a frail, scholarly man and a Vatican diplomat before receiving the red hat in 1953.

In October of 1956, Maciel tearfully told his seminarians in Rome that he had taught them to be obedient to the pope, and now he must show obedience by stepping aside, even though Vatican officials were mistaken. He did not specify how the Vatican had erred. Confusion spread in the community. Those excluded from Maciel’s advances wondered why Pope Pius XII, who had approved the Legionaries’ status, should suspend Father Maciel from his duties. He left for a hospital outside Rome, forbidden to enter the Vatican or the seminary.

Cardinal Valeri and the more powerful Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, secretary of the Holy Office, had grave doubts about Maciel’s integrity. Valeri had seen Maciel in the Salvator Mundi Hospital in the spring of 1956, according to Vaca. The cardinal “walked in his room at 7 A.M. with a secretary and saw him in a drug state.” 34

At least two apostolic investigators—visitators—entered the scene: the Reverend Anastasio Ballestrero, an Italian, the superior general of the Carmelite Order, and the Reverend Benjamin Lachaert, a Belgian, the order’s vicar general. Ballestrero in later years became the cardinal archbishop of Turin. Both men are now deceased. The Legion, in a December 20, 1996, letter to The Hartford Courant, said Ballestrero was dead. The authors accepted the statement at face value; they subsequently learned that the cardinal did not die until June 21, 1998. 35

A third priest, Monsignor Alfredo Bontempi, was an official observer of the seminary, the oversight for which he passed to Father Antonio Lagoa of the Legion. The investigation was done with considerable concern for the students. Monsignor Bontempi introduced himself to the assembled college. “He said that he had been appointed as a supervisor of

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