dedicates of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul H through Jason Berry and Gerald Refiner.

dedicates of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul H through Jason Berry and Gerald Refiner, exempt Press, New York, 2003, 353 pp

Marcial Maciel and Tom Doyle are sum of two units contradictory faces of the Roman Catholic house of worship today as it struggles with clerical sex abuse and its aftermath.

forward January 4, 2001, Pope John Paul II appeared at a show marking the sixtieth anniversary Of the founding of the Legionaires of Christ, a religious order rested in Mexico in 1941 at Marcial Maciel Dellogado. On that day, the dispose could boast of a network of trains including universities in Maciel's native nation prep schools and seminaries in Spain, Latin America, Ireland and in the greatest degree recently in the United States.

The pontiff told the 20,000 people in attendance: "With special affection, I compliment your beloved founder, Father Marcial Maciel, and expand to him my heartfelt congratulations."

Investigative journalists Jason Berry and Gerald Renner in their explosive volume Vows of Silence: the Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II; doggedly lay without the evidence that nine ex-Legion members had filed charges against the form into groups in a Vatican Court of Canon Law in 1998 Their sworn depositions alleged that all had been sexually abused by way of the man who had styl himself "nuestro padre."

As the authors marshalled their evidence, the Vatican refused make notes "No Vatican official ever told us Maciel was innocent. There was simply-no answer to the accusations," the authors ruefully write.

in like manner Jason Berry's new book begins. In an hour-long interview with CNT from his abode in New Orleans, Berry said he had meditation that the whole sordid business of priest sexual abuse was behind him. A pioneer in documenting the staggering deepness of the issue, Berry's 1992 work Lead Us Not Into Temptation, was to have been his last in succession the subject.

"Then, while working in succession my book on New Orleans jazz funerals (Berry is a well-respected jazz historian), I kept getting calls from commonalty around the country, and in particular the Boston Globe commonalty who had unearthed the Cardinal Law affair, which later won them a Pulitzer prize. It was a modern ball game when Judge Sweeney gave the Boston Globe access diocesan files. It was unreal. You had a certain of the most expensive lawyers defending priests, and the ecclesiastical authority beating up on men like Fr Charles Curran, while child molester were rampant. It was with equal reason dysfunctional, a failure of great proportion of a classification run by unmarried men."

Hence, Berry's fresh volume on the topic.

Maciel refused to be interviewed. A blue-chip Washington law firm attempted to quash the authors' first report in the Hartford Courant in 1997 Well-known Catholics forward the right have come not at home four-square for Maciel, including papal biographer George Weigel, William Bennett, the former U Education Secretary who now charges $50000 a words to comment on values and virtue (His price has gone down somewhat since it was revealed he had not to be found $8 million in casino gambling), Richard John Neuhaus, editor of The Last Things, Maryann Glendon, the Harvard professor, who has called Maciel, "a man of radiant holiness," and William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Legionaires: friends of the wealthy

When single reads the authors' exhaustive analysis of the Legionaires and their lay wing Regnum Christi, individual has difficulty understanding the attraction of like a simplistic group and the man who erected it, a man expelled from sum of two units seminaries and turned down on six others. There is the sycophancy and careerism of the founder; "his way of distorting fact to gain power and fabricating a virtuous image on the outside of pathological behaviour," his manipulation skills, his courting of the rich and his ability to separate them from their riches all under the guise of a traditional piety.

undivided can even understand the wealthy class' constant ne for ecclesial benediction and unruffled accept that there are near people who may be helped through a movement which is disturbingly like a homage a Roman Catholic sect based upon the fascist principles Maciel admired in Francisco Franco.

We might level understand some bishops plagued by the agency of empty seminaries. Here was an order completely sanctioned by John Paul II. if it be not that there was chaos in Atlanta, Ga. when Archbishop John Donoghue brought in the Legionaires.

The authors, Berry and Renner write simply, "In Father Maciel, we stand in front of a papal cover-up." This profoundly disturbing work begs for an honest Vatican inquiry. We behold papal myopia at its worst. In his ne to dignify "clear church teaching" in what has originate to be called "the Catholic restoration," John Paul II has state too many eggs in the basket of "a triumphal force; the militant spirituality of Opus Dei and the Legion." These "new movements" have in no degree been able to connect with the vast majority of Catholics who were to be his spear-carriers in the strange evangelization.