More abuse about abuse

Daniel Wakin and James McKinley have an article in The New York Times about yet more Catholic Church problems, this time in Mexico:

The two former Mexican seminarians had gone to the Vatican in 1998 to personally deliver a case recounting decades of sexual abuse by one of the most powerful priests in the Roman Catholic Church, the Reverend Marcial Maciel Degollado. As they left, they ran into the man who would hold Father Maciel’s fate in his hands, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and kissed his ring. The encounter was no accident. Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to meet them, witnesses later said, and their case was soon accepted.
But, in little more than a year, word emerged that Cardinal Ratzinger— the future Pope Benedict XVI— had halted the inquiry. “It isn’t prudent,” he had told a Mexican bishop, according to two people who later talked to the bishop. For five years, the case remained stalled, possibly a hostage to Father Maciel’s powerful protectors in the Curia, the Vatican’s governing apparatus, and his own deep influence at the Holy See.
In any case, it took Cardinal Ratzinger— by then Pope Benedict— until 2006, eight years after the case went before him, to address Father Maciel’s abuses by removing him from priestly duties and banishing him to a life of prayer and penitence, though without publicly acknowledging his wrongs or the suffering of his victims.
Four years after that, the Vatican announced that Benedict would appoint a special delegate to run the powerful worldwide order that Father Maciel had founded, the Legionaries of Christ, and establish a commission to examine its constitution. A close look at the record shows that the case was marked by the same delays and bureaucratic caution that have emerged in the handling of other sexual abuse matters crossing Benedict’s desk, whether as an archbishop in Munich or a cardinal in Rome. Benedict’s supporters believe he was trying to take action on the Maciel case, but was thwarted by other powerful church officials. But advocates for Father Maciel’s victims say that the Vatican’s eventual investigation and reckoning in the case were too little, too late.
The Reverend Alberto Athié Gallo, a Mexican priest who, in 1998, tried to bring allegations of sexual abuse by Father Maciel to the attention of Cardinal Ratzinger, said the Vatican allowed Father Maciel, who died in 2008, to lead a double life for decades. “This was tolerated by the Holy See for years,” Father Athié said. “In this sense I think the Holy See cannot get to the bottom of this matter. It would have to criticize itself as an authority.”
Former Legion seminarians have said that Father Maciel abused them from the early 1940s to the early ’60s, when they were ten to sixteen years old. For years, Father Maciel had cultivated powerful allies among the cardinals, through gifts and cash donations, according to reporting by Jason Berry in the National Catholic Reporter. Mr. Berry is co-author of a book about the order, and helped break the story of the priest’s abuses.
Chief among these allies was the former Vatican secretary of state and, by office, the most powerful man next to Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, now the dean of the College of Cardinals and an outspoken defender of Benedict.
“Until Pope Benedict confronts Sodano’s role in the cover-up of Maciel, I don’t see how he can move beyond the crisis that has engulfed his papacy,” Mr. Berry said. Mr. Berry reported that Cardinal Ratzinger refused an offer of money from the Legionaries.
Cardinal Sodano did not respond to written requests for an interview.
Approaching the truth of what happened with Father Maciel is complicated by the Vatican’s secrecy about its own politics and internal decision making. It is also difficult because of the reverence for John Paul, who, facing a diminishing supply of priests, welcomed the Legion’s orthodoxy and its ability to attract young men to the priesthood.
Father Maciel founded the Legionaries of Christ in Mexico in 1941. It grew to be a powerhouse and now operates in 22 countries, claiming to have 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians. It runs schools, universities, charities, and media outlets. The order acquired the air of a personality cult, with Father Maciel’s pictures dominating the order’s buildings and his writings becoming required reading. Its assets amount to $35 billion, according to Sandro Magister, an Italian journalist who has closely followed the case. The order’s current vicar general, or Number Two leader, the Reverend Luis Garza Medina, scoffed at such amounts, saying in the newspaper La Repubblica that the Legion works to cover expenses, and generated $40 million last year.
Father Maciel’s troubles with the Vatican dated to 1956, when his personal secretary accused him of drug abuse and financial mismanagement; he was suspended for two years during an investigation, after which he was cleared and reinstated in 1959. “From that moment on, he was completely protected by all the high offices of the Vatican,” said Fernando M. González, a sociologist who wrote a book about the Maciel case, based on more than two hundred previously undisclosed documents from church archives, that was published in 2006.

Rico says there's more here, if you have the stomach for it...