Pope John Paul II: Saint of the Bipolar Church of Rome

ON THE CENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH 

Pope John Paul "the Great" 

Canonized Saint of the Bipolar Church of Rome

By Michael Hoffman

www.RevisionistHistory.org

The centenary of John Paul II’s birth (May 18, 1920) is being commemorated with the expected looney-tunes laurels for the pontificate of this prelatical Judas (1978-2005), the former Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Krakow, Poland. 

1992: The Carmelite nuns convent in Auschwitz, as photographed from Block 11

New York Times headline, April 15, 1993

This is the pontiff who, in 1993, ignominiously threw the Carmelite nuns out of Auschwitz, where they had been praying for all victims, Judaic and gentile. The crosses which the devout Polish peasantry had erected around Auschwitz were dismantled, also by papal directive. 

He was money-mad, like all the recent pontiffs, including that favorite of the “traditionalists,” Pope Pius XII who, in 1942, founded the money-laundering operation known as the Vatican Bank. It is officially titled the “Institute for the Works of Religion,” because, according to the Pharisee Hillel, the works of holy religion are necessarily founded upon debt-peonage and usury. In his Notes On the Correct Way to Present the Jews, promulgated June 24, 1985, John-Paul taught: “An exclusively negative picture of the Pharisees is likely to be inaccurate and unjust.” (Contrast this teaching with that of Jesus in Matthew 23:14-15).

Talk about the offense of suppressing the Council of Trent’s Latin Mass all you like, but the papal money mania is among the most egregious abominations of the post-Renaissance papacy. The dogmatic Catechism of the Council of Trent allows for not one farthing of profit above the return of the principal, on any loan. Oh, well, out the window with that disposable dogma, while oblivious “traditionalists” fight to the death for the restoration of the Latin Mass. These bipolar situation ethics breed more of the same, as we shall see.

1991: Papal Bag man Fr. Marcial Maciel embraced by his protector, Saint John Paul the Great

Moneybags Rev. Fr. Marcial Maciel was in special favor with John Paul. Father Maciel was founder-director of Mexico’s Legion of Christ society, “the greatest fundraiser of the modern Roman Catholic Church.” Therefore, long after he and his band of priestly perverts had molested hundreds of boys, and thirty of his seminarians sent urgent testimony to Pope John Paul alerting him to these crimes, the pontiff kept Maciel close to his pectoral cross, embracing and showering him with access and accolades, as the cash registers at the “Institute for the Works of Religion” filled with molester’s gold.

Beyond Fr. Marcial Maciel and the misnamed Legionaries of Christ, there were countless molestations of youth throughout the U.S., Ireland, Britain, Canada, Australia and Europe, of which John Paul was informed and about which he did nothing. Much of the horrendous child molestation that cost Rome billions of dollars in the pontificates of his successors, occurred during his papacy.

When Cardinal Bernard Law fled Boston, rather than risk facing prosecution for multiple counts of repeatedly facilitating the molestation of children by priests under his command, John Paul not only provided him safe haven in Rome, he awarded Law the prestigious post of Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, an office which confers upon the holder citizenship in Vatican City, and therefore certain protections from extradition by foreign law enforcement. 

1986: A penitent Pope Saint John Paul the Great contritely bows his head to Grand Rabbi Elio Toaff at the synagogue in Rome

John Paul was a novel theologian. One of his novelties was his concoction of the doctrine that the followers of the Talmudic creed are “Our elder brothers in the Faith,” which, if you think about it, is a confession of the pope’s actual Faith, which certainly was not the Catholicism of the pre-Renaissance popes, or saints such as Vincent Ferrer. He obliquely condemned all of them after Rabbi Elio Toaff admitted him to Rome’s Great Synagogue, in 1986. There, the two sat on identical thrones. Speaking in the synagogue, John Paul denounced opposition to Judaism “at any time and by anyone. I repeat, ‘by anyone,” he said, in a statement that was interpreted (correctly), as a repudiation of every Catholic apostle, saint and pontiff who had fervently sought the salvation of Judaic souls through their conversion to Christ. John Paul insinuated that Judaics were saved by their race; an unscriptural, racist deceit compounded by the fact that many of them are descended of the non-Jewish Khazars, not Abraham. Is there a more pernicious act of Jew-hate than to swindle Judaic persons into imagining that they don’t need faith in Jesus Christ to be saved? (Matthew 10:5-7).

Also in 1986, John Paul II invited Buddhists and African witch doctors to the church of St. Francis of Assisi where a statue of Buddha was placed on the tabernacle and the pontiff joined in a parliament-of-religions group prayer. 

“Seeds of the Word” 

The papal saint greets a voodoo high priest in Benin 

In 1993, in the course of his African “pilgrimage” to formerly Catholic Benin, he told the chieftains of voodoo in that country, that their idolatrous superstitions, which had held Black people in bondage for centuries, contained “seeds of the Word” of God (cf. L'Osservatore Romano, February 10, 1993).  After that favorable assessment was pronounced by “the Vicar of Christ on earth,” voodoo surged in Benin, and three years later the government conferred upon voodoo the status of "an officially recognized religion" (cf. Associated Press dispatch, January 11, 1996).

The fact that John Paul II was “infallibly” judged to be a saint, and canonized in 2014 by Pope Francis, an act “concelebrated" by 150 cardinals and 700 bishops, to the acclaim of an estimated 800,000 pilgrims present in Rome, and tens of millions of devotees around the world, tells us all we need to know about today’s bipolar “Catholic” Church.

Copyright©2020 by Independent History and Research

Michael Hoffman is the author of The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017), and Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not (2013)

For further research:

Archbishop Viganò protests the One-world religion of Freemasonry and the “infernal” Pope Francis

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Attempt to Censor Michael Hoffman on Twitter Fails

Attempt to Censor Michael Hoffman on Twitter Fails

Good news! As many of you know, our scholarship is repeatedly targeted for censorship and deplatforming online by the enemies of knowledge and freedom. 

With all the complaints about Twitter in this regard, let’s give Twitter credit for declining today to suppress our April 2 tweet or deplatform us, because we dared to publish an accurate citation from the Talmud.  

Today Twitter e-mailed us as follows:

“We have received a complaint regarding your account, @HoffmanMichaelA, for the following content.

Tweet ID: 1113143468514205696

Tweet Text: How much truth can you handle? 

TALMUDIC DOCTRINE “If a grown man has intercourse with a little girl less than three years old, all agree that it is not a significant sexual act…” 

“The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition,” Ketubot 11b, vol. 7 (NY: Random House, 1991), p. 145. #metoo

 We have investigated  the reported content and could not identify any violations of the Twitter Rules (https://support.twitter.com/articles18311) or applicable law. Accordingly, we have not taken any action at this time."

Sincerely,

Twitter 

(end quote from Twitter)

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Our enemies endeavor to instill in us despair, defeatism and paralysis, with the objective of removing us from the field of spiritual and intellectual battle. To succumb to this psychological warfare is a sin against the virtue of Hope. God is in charge, not the powers of darkness. If we have faith in Him, then we will sit tall in the saddle and continue to charge, trusting in His Sovereign Will.

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Michael Hoffman’s books are sold here, as well as at this link and here  

Michael's speech to the national convention of the Nation of Islam is online here

Donate to our Truth Mission here

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Molestation facilitator honored by “traditional Catholics"

Updated July 18, 2018

Some “traditional Latin Mass Catholics” have issued a nauseating celebration of the life of a prelatical child molestation facilitator — Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos — who died in May

Cardinal Hoyos

By Michael Hoffman

www.RevisionistHistory.org

From the highly regarded Rorate Caeli blog: “Dario Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos passed away on the 17th of May, 2018, according to the Colombian Bishops’ Conference. He was 88. We ask all of our readers to pray and have Masses said for the repose of his soul...At the very least he was the one most outspoken in defending the rights of Traditionalists in the Church, and the Gregorian Rite itself...

“He celebrated more Pontifical Masses according to the 1962 Missal than his predecessors as PCED President, including the Solemn Pontifical Mass that he celebrated in Santa Maria Maggiore on May 24, 2003 in the presence of 5 other Cardinals, an Archbishop, 2 Bishops and 3,000 faithful. It was the first Solemn Pontifical Mass according to the 1962 Missal to be celebrated in any of the Major Basilicas since the liturgical reforms of Paul VI. 

"To mark the coming into effect of Summorum Pontificum he celebrated a Solemn Pontifical Mass in the Lower Church at the Basilica of the Holy House of Loreto on September 14, 2007. As late as 2013 and 2016 he celebrated Pontifical Masses for the annual Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage to Rome. 

"His cordial attitude towards the Society of St. Pius X was indispensable to forming the necessary atmosphere for the resumption of the dialogue between them and the Vatican. Again and again he underlined that the SSPX is neither schismatic nor heretical...”

Source: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2018/05/in-memoriam-dario-cardinal-castrillon.html#more online May 19.

It doesn’t matter to these obsessive Latin Mass advocates that Cardinal Hoyos is on record congratulating French Bishop Pierre Pican for not notifying the police about a priest, Rev. Fr. René Bissey, who was molesting boys. He wrote to Bishop Pican: 

“I congratulate you on not having spoken out to civil authorities against a priest,” wrote Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who at the time was prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy. “You have done well and I am delighted…” 

Cf. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8624763.stm

Hoyos’ statement is the legacy of the secret, “higher soul” Kabbalistic doctrine that infiltrated the Church beginning in the Renaissance: that because of a “mark” conferred upon the souls of priests at their ordination, they have a higher type of soul than the Catholic laity (cf. The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome, a book given “the silent treatment” by “conservative” and  “traditional Catholic” editors and journalists).  

Hence, for the sake of the alleged higher-souled priest, the molestation of little boys ought to be covered up and a bishop who, in the words of Cardinal Hoyos, in charge of all priests throughout the world, the guilty priest is to be protected from the police.

"...some adverse publicity"

Una Voce, the Latin Mass advocacy group in Britain, stated as follows: "In 2010 there was some adverse publicity surrounding Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos which culminated in a widely-publicized withdrawal from celebrating the Mass at the national shrine in the USA. The Federation President wrote to His Eminence to express his support..." - Gregorius Magnus (Una Voce magazine), June, 2018, p. 15.


The freakish priorities of some “traditional” Catholics are beyond degenerate. As the  homage to Hoyos  by Una Voce and Rorate Caeli illustrates, what matters above all is not the innocence of children, but the proliferation of the Mass. 

In an April 22, 2010 radio interview, Cardinal Castrillon said that he did not regret writing in 2001 to congratulate a French bishop for not informing police about an abusive priest. He said that for a bishop to inform on a priest would be like a father testifying in court against a child. “Why would they ask that of the Church?” he said.  Source: Catholic Culture.org

In 2018 nothing has changed about the molestation of children by the papalists; the rhetoric has been altered, and yes, whatever investigations and prosecutions necessary to placate a public now on the alert, have been implemented. But the diabolic doctrine remains in place and the Vatican, along with many (though not all) “traditional Catholics,” continues to bestow high honors on molestation facilitators such as Hoyos, and before him, the fugitive from justice Cardinal Bernard Law. 

When the public furor over molestations dies down, the molestation epidemic will resume, because it is inherent to the Hermetic-Kabbalistic post-Renaissance Church of Rome. Woe to those who share in these transgressions against children by making an idol out of advocacy of the Latin Mass while ignoring the corrupt of the earth who promote it for Machiavellian purposes.

Ignoramuses imagine that the “traditional Catholic Church of the great popes of yesteryear” fought the Talmud and totally defeated its theology. This was true of the pontiffs of the medieval True Catholic Church. It was subverted and overthrown beginning under the Medici popes however, starting with Leo X, who promoted the publication of the Talmud and protected the advocates of the Kabbalah (Pope Leo was not unique in this regard as the hidden record of his successors demonstrates).

The best edition of the Babylonian Talmud produced in world history up to that time was published with the blessing and assistance of Pope Leo X and his co-conspirators. 

Recall that the Talmud in BT Sanhedrin 54b absolves the Judaic adult male from all sin, and exempts him from all responsibility in the matter of molesting boys under the age of nine. This halacha was confirmed by the supreme legal authority in Ashkenazi Judaism, the “Rambam” — Rabbi Moses Maimonides, in his Sefer Kedusha, Hilchot Issurei Bia (1:14).

You know you are in the realm of the Talmud when you encounter a two tier legal system: one law for the privileged class and another for everyone else. This is the very root of tyranny: the Communist Party members and the non-communist people; the Judaic adult male and little children; the Church of Rome’s priests and children.

As a researcher investigating these recondite matters for the past 20 years, one would expect that my work would be welcomed, publicized and promoted by those who claim they are fighting for Jesus Christ. Instead, I am censored and suppressed at almost every turn by those claiming to be on God’s side in the fight for Truth. 

The con game by the corrupt of the earth continues.

For further research:

“Vatican Compares Molestation Scandal to “Persecution of the Jews”

https://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2010/04/vatican-compares-molestation-scandal-to.html

“The Silent Partner in America’s Molestation Culture”

https://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-silent-partner-in-americas.html

Your donation = the survival of our Truth Mission

https://revisionisthistorystore.blogspot.com 

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Followers of the Talmud charged with Intimidating Witness

(The alleged intimidation is based on the Talmudic law against mesirah -- against handing fellow Judaic persons over to gentile police or government officials. Denial of kosher certification was, allegedly, also used as a weapon. -- Michael Hoffman)

4 Hasidic Men Facing Charges of Intimidation

Sharon Otterman | New York Times (excerpt) | June 22, 2012, pp. A1 and A21

The Brooklyn district attorney, facing a wave of public criticism about his handling of sexual abuse allegations in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, on June 21 charged four men with attempting to silence an accuser by offering her and her boyfriend a $500,000 bribe, and threatening her boyfriend’s business.

The district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, alleged that the men were part of an effort to protect a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community, Nechemya Weberman, who has been accused of 88 counts of sexual misconduct, including oral sex with a child younger than 13 years old. The charges all involve one girl, now 17, who was referred by her school to get counseling by Mr. Weberman, and then alleged she was abused by him during therapy sessions.

The charges are the first time in at least two decades that Mr. Hynes has charged Hasidic Jews with intimidation of a witness in a sexual abuse case, even though victims, their advocates and prosecutors say intimidation has long been a major obstacle to prosecution of abuse among the ultra-Orthodox. In recent weeks, Mr. Hynes has been saying that the intimidation of witnesses in the ultra-Orthodox community is worse than in the world of organized crime.

“I’m hoping that this will be a message to those who are intimidated that they should come forward and help us,” Mr. Hynes said at a news conference. “No one can engage in this kind of conduct and feel free that, based on prior experience, nothing can happen to them.”

Prosecutors charged Abraham Rubin, 48, of Williamsburg with bribery, witness tampering and coercion. They said that he had been recorded offering the accuser’s boyfriend the money, and he suggested that the young couple could flee to Israel to avoid testifying. He also offered to provide them with a lawyer who could help them avoid cooperating with prosecutors.

Prosecutors also charged three brothers, Jacob, Joseph and Hertzka Berger, with coercion, saying they threatened and then removed the kosher certification of a restaurant run by the accuser’s boyfriend. The brothers are sons of a local rabbi who issues kosher certifications to stores.

The four men pleaded not guilty on Thursday in a Brooklyn courtroom packed with benches full of their supporters, dressed in the dark clothing worn by Hasidic men.

Hertzka Berger’s lawyer, Bruce Wenger, said after the arraignment that the four men “all deny the allegations. They are all obviously going to be fighting these cases vehemently,” he said. “They are looking forward to their day in court.”

But a prosecutor, Josh Hanshaft, said the men had been “telling witnesses to forget what they know, not to come to court, to disappear,” and said prosecutors had “clear, substantial evidence” that part of the plan to silence witnesses involved offering money to dissuade their testimony.

If convicted, Mr. Rubin faces up to seven years in prison. Joseph and Hertzka Berger each face a year in jail, and Jacob Berger faces up to four years. Mr. Weberman has denied the abuse allegations, and his lawyer, George Farkas, said Mr. Weberman knew nothing of the alleged intimidation.

“Mr. Weberman, and his attorneys, are appalled by these allegations, which if true, are reprehensible,” Mr. Farkas said. The intimidation charges, a moment of triumph for Mr. Hynes, come as his office has been criticized by victims, victims’ advocates, former Mayor Ed Koch and others for an insufficiently aggressive response to the sexual abuse of minors within the ultra-Orthodox community.

...In the Williamsburg case, the accuser was in sixth grade when she was referred to Mr. Weberman, an unlicensed therapist, by her Williamsburg religious school, a close family member said in an interview last month. Her parents were told she would be expelled from school unless they paid $150 an hour for him to provide her with therapy.

Instead, Mr. Weberman, who is now 53, repeatedly sexually molested her over three years, when she was 12 to 15, and told her that she would be expelled from school if she told anyone, the relative said. The girl then changed schools and told a licensed therapist what had happened. The therapist reported the girl’s allegations to the police.

After Mr. Weberman’s arrest in 2011, a campaign of intimidation is alleged to have begun against the accuser, her boyfriend and her family members. Prominent Hasidic Jews publicly proclaimed their support for Mr. Weberman, and, on May 16, hosted hundreds of Hasidic men at a local wedding hall to raise money for Mr. Weberman’s legal defense. To promote the fund-raiser, his supporters hung posters on lampposts and brick walls around the neighborhood, accusing the young woman, in Yiddish, of libel.

The girl’s boyfriend, 24-year-old Hershy Deutsch, organized a demonstration outside the fund-raiser. In an interview at the time, he said that he had faced intimidation because of his girlfriend’s allegations, and that he had decided to speak out. He said that a restaurant he manages in Williamsburg, the Old Williamsburg Cafe on Lee Avenue, was targeted by a flood of false complaints to city authorities in late April.

And, he said, men from the neighborhood had offered him $500,000 if he could persuade the girl to drop her case.

“For those of you questioning the credibility of the victim’s story,” Mr. Deutsch wrote in a letter he posted on his Facebook page, “ask yourself the following question: Would a non-guilty person offer someone a half a million dollars if they drop the charges?”

“Speak up!” he wrote. “Face the facts, our community has been covering up these stories for way too long. We have to put an end to this!”

On Thursday afternoon a metal gate was rolled down over the entrance to the Old Williamsburg Cafe, and a sign taped to the door said that the store “will be closed until further notice.”

Victims’ advocates said June 21 that they were glad that Mr. Hynes had brought an intimidation case, and hoped it would begin to ease the problem. While some ultra-Orthodox rabbis now say that a child molester should be reported to the police, others strictly adhere to an ancient Jewish prohibition against mesirah, the turning in of a Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and instruct victims to either remain silent or let rabbinical authorities quietly handle the allegations.

“This is a big threshold,” said Mark Appel, the founder of Voice of Justice, a nonprofit agency that helps ultra-Orthodox victims. And Joel Engelman, the founder of the Jewish Survivors Network, also praised Mr. Hynes for bringing the intimidation case, because, he said, “in the Williamsburg Hasidic community, intimidation is rampant.”

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.
[End quote from the New York Times]

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Fight Child Molestation - Ban Rabbinic Law in the USA

Republicans Seek to Ban Sharia Law but give a free pass to Rabbinic Law:

Why the Double Standard?

By Michael Hoffman

Please raise this urgent issue in your church and community: ask your pastor and politicans who favor a ban on Sharia law, why extremely dangerous Rabbinic law, which is a proven threat to the health and safety of the most vulnerable Americans, is allowed to remain in force in our nation.

Multiple examples of rabbinic law leading to grievous harm in the United States (Lakewood, N.J., Monsey, N.Y., and Baltimore, Md.) with no Republican "Christian" conservatives standing up to campaign against rabbinic law, as they do Sharia law.

For Jewish Orthodox Children: No Justice -- No Peace

Huffington Post | May 17, 2012

While Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes boasts that he stemmed the tide of child molestation in Brooklyn's Catholic community by insisting that the Bishops sign a "memo of agreement" to turn over all allegations directly to his office, this is a far cry from his agreement with the Agudah rabbis allowing them to decide which alleged molesters are reported to the police...

Regardless of Mr. Hynes' claims that he "expects" that these allegations will "also be reported to his office," he has never criticized the rabbis for not reporting them despite the fact that there exists not a single documented case in which a leading rabbi in Brooklyn has reported a molester to the police.

An account detailed in "Tempest and the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals" (Brandeis University Press, 2009), citing research published in 2008 in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, documents that in at least one case Mr. Hynes allowed a Beit Din (rabbinical court) lead by Rabbi Dovid Feinstein to decide the outcome of a grand jury investigation.

Following the Beit Din ruling in March of 2000, the D.A. dropped charges against Rabbi Shlomo Hafner of molesting a 10-year-old hearing-impaired boy, with one of the rabbis bragging that "We educated the D.A. on how to properly conduct a sex abuse trial."

Prosecutorial tolerance in Brooklyn and other Orthodox enclaves (such as Lakewood, N.J., Monsey, N.Y., and Baltimore, Md.) for rabbis protecting child molesters is all the more disturbing at a time when the national and global trend is increasingly to crack down on cover ups.

In Missouri, a Catholic Bishop was indicted for failing to report an abusive priest, and four Amish Bishops were convicted of failing in their duty as mandated reporters to inform the authorities of a child molester in their church. Officers of the University of Pennsylvania were arrested for failing to report allegations against football coach Jerry Sandusky, and the Archbishop of Philadelphia is being tried for endangering the welfare of children after allowing accused priests to work with children without alerting police or unsuspecting parents. In Los Angeles, the Archbishop has been investigated by the FBI for fraudulently passing off a pedophile priest as safe to be teaching children...

But in the name of "cultural sensitivity" the State's Attorney's office in New Jersey tolerates a "wall of silence" by rabbis in Lakewood, who proudly announced in the Asbury Park Press in 2009 that all cases of sexual abuse against children are "handled" by a special Beit Din that was set up by the local yeshivah.

...(New Jersey) State's Attorney Marlene Lynch Ford has made no efforts to force the rabbis to turn over cases of child abuse that they have "adjudicated," despite the fact that it is a crime in New Jersey for any adult to fail to report suspicions of abuse to the authorities.

In Baltimore, there has been extensive coverage...documenting the Va'ad Harrabanim (the Council of Rabbis) putting pressure on victims of abuse and their advocates to keep silent, and yet law enforcement agencies refuse to even investigate as long as victims are still too intimidated to come forward.

In many cases of child molestation in the Catholic Church, including in Long Island, N.Y., Boston and Philadelphia, prosecutors have convened grand juries to subpoena all the records of abuse allegations, and in one example in Belgium last year, police raided church offices to investigate hidden records. In cases of rabbinic cover ups, however, prosecutors have not even gone as far as asking nicely and respectfully for the rabbis to give them all of the names of the alleged molesters they know about, and have certainly not put any pressure at all on the rabbis for breaking the law and endangering the welfare of children. (End quote from The Huffington Post)

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Observe the statement from the article, "Beth Din" (see below) that the rabbinic court is ruled by "Jewish law" and "Jewish law" is based on the Shulhan Arukh, in other words, not on the Word of God, but on the word of a long dead man, Rabbi Joseph Karo, compiler of the Shulhan Arukh. The judge of the rabbinic court is a "highly esteemed Talmudic scholar" and "halakhic genius." Note that the credentials of the judge of the rabbinic court are based on his scholarship in the Talmud, not the Word of God. His "genius" is in rabbinic law ("halakha"), not God's law.

Nothing about rabbinic (Talmudic) law bothers the American campaigners against Sharia law, such as Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, even though rabbinic law rules the Brooklyn district attorney's office, to give but one example: school teachers at Talmudic schools in Brooklyn must obtain permission from a rabbi before first reporting the molestation of children to the Brooklyn District Attorney. According to the New York Times, "the Brooklyn district attorney, Mr. (Charles J.) Hynes, has not publicly opposed the position."

According to Sharon Otterman of the New York Times, "...in molestation cases, (rabbinic) religious courts are often convened on an ad hoc basis to adjudicate on a narrow question — like whether someone accused of molesting is fit to continue working at a school, or whether compensation should be made to a person making accusations. The judges tend to take actions like switching an accused person’s job, monitoring him or her, ordering therapy or ordering compensation for a victim. Sometimes religious courts do not fully accept the testimony of children or women, making proving molestation claims very difficult."

Another example: the worst serial rapist of children in the history of Brooklyn New York, surpassing any Catholic priest, is Avrohom Mondrowitz, someone you probably never heard of.

"Avrohom Mondrowitz was indicted...in the 1980s on eight counts of child abuse and five counts of sodomy involving boys ages 9 to 15. He fled to Israel before he could be arrested. Victims’ rights groups say Mr. Mondrowitz has many more victims, perhaps in the hundreds. Michael Lesher, a New Jersey lawyer representing some of the reported victims, uncovered federal documents that Mr. Lesher contended showed that Mr. Hynes’s office approved a decision in 1993 to drop efforts to extradite Mr. Mondrowitz. Mr. Hynes’s office has long denied dropping those efforts, and in 2007 made a new push to bring Mr. Mondrowitz back, but Israel’s Supreme Court ultimately ruled against extradition." (Ibid., New York Times).

Beth Din 
(rabbinic law court)

http://givashamorah.org/Home_Page.html

Beth Din Givas Hamorah is a rabbinic court that adjudicates civil disputes between Jewish litigants who agree to be bound by Orthodox Jewish law as laid down in Shulhan Arukh Hoshen Mishpat and its glossators. Marital transactions such as marriage, divorce, yibbum and halitzah may also be executed in our court.

Our court consists of a panel of three dayyanim (justices) drawn from a pool of over 20 rabbanim who are Talmudic scholars by profession and experts in Jewish law. Our rosh beth din (chief justice) is the renown Rabbi Yehoshua Gluck, a graduate of Slabodka Yeshiva and a highly esteemed Talmudic scholar and halakhic genius.

In accordance with halakha (Jewish law)  and in order to preserve the integrity of halakhic jurisprudence, our beth din provides all its services absolutely free of charge. Moreover, our beth din will not accept any payment, donation or gift from anyone utilizing our services.

Our beth din was founded in order to address the abuses and inefficiencies of most other major bate dinim, such as the endlessly drawn-out litigation process designed to exploit and maximize a profit from litigants. Furthermore, we are the only beth din who fully comply with the rule that hanotel sekhar ladun dinav betelim: whoever takes recompense to adjudicate, his judgements are null. (End quote)

MICHAEL HOFFMAN SAYS:

Fight Child Molestation - Ban Rabbinic Law in the USA

www.revisionisthistory.org

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Pope John Paul "the Great" and his crime syndicate: Part I, Fr. Maciel

Contents

1. Investigative reporting by Jason Berry

2. "The Mission of Father Maciel"

by Alma Guillermoprieto

3. Michael Hoffman's Afterword 

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"Money paved way for Maciel's influence in the Vatican"

Jason Berry, April 6, 2010 (excerpt)

"How Fr. Maciel built his empire"

Jason Berry, Apr. 12, 2010 (excerpt)

Nov. 30, 2004: Pope John Paul II gives his apostolic blessing to Rev. Fr. Marcial Maciel

...Maciel was a morphine addict who sexually abused at least 20 Legion seminarians from the 1940s to the '60s. Bishop John McGann of Rockville Centre, N.Y., sent a letter by a former Legion priest with detailed allegations to the Vatican in 1976, 1978 and 1989 through official channels. Nothing happened.

Maciel began fathering children in the early 1980s -- three of them by two Mexican women, with reports of a third family with three children in Switzerland, according to El Mundo in Madrid, Spain.

Concealing his web of relations, Maciel raised a fortune from wealthy backers, and ingratiated himself with church officials in Rome...Maciel's chief supporter (was) 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....

In 1994 Pope John Paul II heralded him (Maciel) as "an efficacious guide to youth." John Paul continued praising Maciel after a 1997 Hartford Courant investigation by Gerald Renner and this writer exposed Maciel's drug habits and abuse of seminarians.

In 1998, eight ex-Legionaries filed a canon law case to prosecute him in then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's tribunal. For the next six years, Maciel had the staunch support of three pivotal figures: Sodano; Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life; and Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Polish secretary of John Paul.

During those years, Sodano pressured Ratzinger not to prosecute Maciel...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...

John Paul's support gave Maciel credibility as he moved with seamless ease among the ultra-wealthy. At a 2004 fundraiser in New York, a video cameraman filmed him running his fingers down the tuxedo lapel of the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, a major Legion supporter. Besides donations, Legion schools in Mexico with high tuitions and low salaries subsidized the operations in Rome...Legion supporters ranged from Steve McEveety, producer of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" (Legion priests advised on the film), to Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza and Ave Maria University in Florida. Others who supported the Legion include former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who spoke at Legion conferences...and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, who wrote that he believed with "moral certainty" that the charges against Maciel were "false and malicious."

Harvard Law Professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon taught at Regina Apostolorum Athenaeum, the Legion's university in Rome, and advised in the planning that led to the order's first university in America, University of Sacramento, Calif. In a 2002 letter for the Legion Web site she scoffed at the allegations against him and praised Maciel's "radiant holiness" and "the success of Regnum Christi [the order's lay wing] and the Legionaries of Christ in advancing the New Evangelization."...

William Donohue, president of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, defended Maciel in a letter to the Hartford Courant, after a 1997 article that exposed Maciel's history of pedophilia.

Two Legion priests are TV news celebrities: Jonathan Morris on FOX, and Tom Williams, a theology professor at the Legion university in Rome, for NBC during Katie Couric's coverage of the 2005 conclave and again with Couric at CBS....(we) made repeated efforts to seek comment from the three cardinals who allegedly received substantial payments under Maciel's auspices, by speaking with Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi on the telephone and via follow-up e-mails. Besides calls to the residences of the two cardinals in Rome, the paper made an extensive effort to contact now-Cardinal Dziwisz, in Krakow, Poland. Iowana Hoffman, a Polish journalist in New York, translated a letter with questions for the cardinal, faxed it to Dziwisz's press secretary, but was told that the cardinal "does not have time for an interview."

Sodano, the former secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, and Martínez Somalo, former papal chamberlain, did not respond to messages left with Lombardi. A receptionist who answered Sodano's residential number said to call the Vatican. The woman answering Martínez Somalo's phone, when asked in Spanish if he would speak with a journalist, said emphatically, " No entrevista! " -- "No interview."


Had Sodano, Martínez Somalo and Dziwisz responded, the cardinals might have answered one question that hovers over this baroque financial drama: How do Vatican officials decide what to report, and to whom, if they are given large sums of money? The Vatican has no constitution or statutes that would make such transactions illegal. But those familiar with the strategy say it was Maciel's goal to insulate himself from the Vatican's archaic system of secret tribunals by making friends with men in power. For most of his life, it worked.

...The Legion constitution included the highly controversial Private Vows, by which each Legionary swore never to speak ill of Maciel, or the superiors, and to report to them anyone who uttered criticism. The vows basically rewarded spying as an expression of faith, and cemented the Legionaries' lockstep obedience to the founder....

Dziwisz was John Paul's closest confidante, a Pole who had a bedroom in the private quarters of the Apostolic Palace. Maciel spent years cultivating Dziwisz's support. Under Maciel, the Legion steered streams of money to Dziwisz in his function as gatekeeper for the pope's private Masses in the Apostolic Palace....such exchanges are not considered bribes in the view of Nicholas Cafardi, a prominent canon lawyer and the dean emeritus of Duquesne University Law School in Pittsburgh. Cafardi, who has done work as a legal consultant for many bishops, responded to a general question about large donations to priests or church officials in the Vatican. Under church law (canon 1302), a large financial gift to an official in Rome "would qualify as a pious cause," explains Cafardi. He spoke in broad terms, saying that such funds should be reported to the cardinal-vicar for Rome. An expensive gift, like a car, need not be reported.


...Maciel wanted to buy power," said the priest who facilitated the Mexican family's opera carita to Dziwisz. He did not use the word bribery, but in explaining why he left the Legion, morality was at issue. "It got to a breaking point for me [over] a culture of lying [within the order]. The superiors know they're lying and they know that you know," he said. "They lie about money, where it comes from, where it goes, how it's given."

When Martínez Somalo, a Spaniard, became head of the congregation overseeing religious in 1994, Maciel dispatched this priest to Martínez Somalo's home. The young priest carried an envelope thick with cash. "I didn't bat an eye," he recalled. "I went up to his apartment, handed him the envelope, said goodbye. ... It was a way of making friends, insuring certain help if it were needed, oiling the cogs."...Martínez Somalo's office took a new name: Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. But the job description stayed the same. From 1994 to 2004, the Spanish cardinal's duties included investigating any complaints about religious orders or their leaders. In the files of that congregation, according to several former Legionaries, sat letters that dated back many years, accusing Maciel of abusing seminarians. When the wrenching accounts of nine seminary-victims of Maciel made news in the 1997 Hartford Courant, Martínez Somalo did nothing. That was the reaction throughout the Roman curia.
John Paul named Martínez Somalo to the post of carmelango, or chamberlain, the official in charge of the conclave when a pope is elected.

For years Maciel had Legion priests dole out envelopes with cash and donate gifts to officials in the curia. In the days leading up to Christmas, Legion seminarians spent hours packaging the baskets with expensive bottles of wine, rare brandy, and cured Spanish hams that alone cost upward of $1,000 each. Priests involved in the gifts and larger cash exchanges say that in hindsight they view Maciel's strategy as akin to an insurance policy, to protect himself should he be exposed and to position the Legion as an elite presence in the workings of the Vatican.

Fichter, the former Legion member, is today pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Haworth, N.J. He has been a diocesan priest for a decade, and serves in the Newark archdiocese. He coordinated the Legion's administrative office in Rome from February 1998 until October 2000. "When Fr. Maciel would leave Rome it was my duty to supply him with $10,000 in cash -- $5,000 in American dollars, and the other half in the currency of the country to which he was traveling," explained Fichter. "I would be informed by one of his assistants that he was leaving and I would have to prepare the funds for him. I never questioned that he was not using it for good and noble purposes. It was a routine part of my job. He was so totally above reproach that I felt honored to have that role. He did not submit any receipts and I would have not dared to ask him for a receipt."

...After the ex-Legion victims filed a canonical case in 1998 against Maciel in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Sodano as secretary of state -- essentially, the Vatican prime minister -- pressured Ratzinger, as the congregation's prefect, to halt the proceeding. ...José Barba, a college professor in Mexico City and ex-Legionary who filed the 1998 case in Ratzinger's office, learned from the canonist handling the case, Martha Wegan in Rome, of Sodano's role.

"Sodano came over with his entire family, 200 of them, for a big meal when he was named cardinal," recalled Favreau. "And we fed them all. When he became secretary of state there was another celebration. He'd come over for special events, like the groundbreaking with a golden shovel for the House of Higher Studies. And a dinner after that." The intervention of a high Vatican official in a tribunal case illustrates the fragile nature of the system, and in the Maciel case, how a guilty man escaped punishment for years. "Cardinal Sodano was the cheerleader for the Legion," said one of the ex-Legionaries. "He'd come give a talk at Christmas and they'd give him $10,000."

...In 2009, a year after Maciel's death, the Legion disclosed its surprise on discovering that he had a daughter. The news jolted the order and its lay arm, Regnum Christi. Yet in an organization built on a cult of personality, the long praise from John Paul suggested a legacy of virtue in Maciel. Legion officials scrambled to suppress skepticism. Two Legion priests (said) in July (2009) that seminarians in Rome were still being taught about Maciel's virtuous life. "They are being brainwashed, as if nothing happened," said a Legionary, sitting on a bench near Rome's Tiber River....

In a book on Maciel published in Spain, journalist Alfonso Torres Robles calls an event on Jan. 3, 1991, "one of the most powerful demonstrations of strength by the Legion ... at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, when John Paul II ordained 60 Legionaries into the priesthood, in the presence of 7,000 Regnum Christi members from different countries, 15 cardinals, 52 bishops and many millionaire benefactors." Maciel had the event filmed and a sequence used in a video the Legion sold until 2006. John Paul was a strategic image in Legion mass mailings and the video shown to potential donors when seminarians accompanied priests to their homes. 

...Maciel forced all Legionaries to take private vows, never to speak ill of Maciel or any superiors, and to report to their superiors anyone who did. The vows ensured his cult of personality. 

Juan Vaca and seven other early victims of Maciel who first spoke publicly, in the 1997 Hartford Courant report by Gerald Renner and this writer, gave graphic accounts of how, in Spain and Rome in the 1950s, they watched Maciel inject himself with a morphine painkiller called dolantin, as the drug was called at the time. In 1956, a strung-out Maciel entered Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome. Cardinal Valerio Valeri, a reed-like former diplomat and prefect for Congregation of Religious, was furious over letters from an older seminarian in Mexico City who had seen Maciel self-inject and worried about his overly affectionate behavior with boys. The priest who ran the Legion high school was also concerned about Maciel's drug use and advances on youths. Cardinal Valeri suspended Maciel and arranged for Carmelite priests to assume control of the Legion house. 

...Maciel traveled between Spain and Latin America, raising money for a big project underway in Rome: Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica. Maciel got his break in 1959 when Pius XII died. Micara, by then the vicar of Rome, signed an order reinstating Maciel — something for which, in the interregnum between popes, he had no authority to do. Canon law puts official duties in abeyance in the interim. What were Valeri and other officials who were offended by Maciel to do? Expend what capital they had with the new pontiff, challenging Micara over a druggy priest with a vice for boys but cash lines to build a basilica? Maciel was redeemed by an illegitimate order from a cardinal to whom he had given $10,000 13 years before, according to a priest with access to Legion files. 

....Maciel reaped lasting dividends in Monterrey with the Garza-Sada families. The dynasty dates to 1890, when Isaac Garza and his brother-in-law, Francisco Sada, opened a brewery. Isaac's sons, Eugenio and Roberto Garza Sada, both graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a bottling factory in 1943. As they branched into other industries, the Garza brothers founded a university, TEC — the Technical Institute of Superior Studies in Monterrey. Maciel launched private schools in Monterrey, one for boys, one for girls. He exported to America a model for prep schools to attract well-heeled families who would join Regnum Christi, which organized study groups to discuss Maciel's letters. Lay celibates, the highest level of Regnum Christi members, live in communities and work relentlessly on fundraising...."They were grooming us for Regnum Christi — the Movement. If your family had money, power, influence, they wanted you. They kept telling me, 'God gave you everything, you must give back by fighting the forces of evil.' … Their whole discourse was this paradise of moral rectitude...." Two of (Garza-Sada) siblings joined the Movement. Paulina, now in her 50s, is a Regnum Christi consecrated woman in Rome. A brother, Fr. Luis Garza Medina, graduated from Stanford University in California in 1978 with a degree in industrial engineering and entered the Legion. At 32 he became vicar general, the second highest position. Through the two siblings, Maciel secured a continuing flow of money from the family. Fr. Garza donated $3 million of his inheritance to the Legion, according to a colleague at the time. In an e-mail exchange, Fr. Garza would neither confirm nor deny the amount or the donation....

Maciel died in a surreal drama where his life pieces converged with shuddering fall. In late January 2008, he was in a hospital in Miami, according to a Jan. 31, 2010 report by reporters Sota and Vidal of El Mundo....In the hospital gathered Alvaro Corcuera, Maciel's successor as director general; the Legion's general secretary, Evarista Sada; and numerous other associates. Maciel reportedly refused to make a confession, stirring such concerns that someone summoned an exorcist, though the article does not describe a ritual. The men around Maciel were jarred when two women appeared: Norma the mother, and Normita, 23. At that point, Maciel reportedly said of the Normas: "I want to stay with them."

The El Mundo article continues: "The Legionary priests, alarmed by Maciel's attitude, called Rome. [Fr.] Luis Garza knew right away that this was a grave problem. He consulted with the highest authority, Alvaro Corcuera, and then hopped on the first plane to Miami and went directly to the hospital.
[Garza's] indignation could be read on his face. He faced the once-powerful founder and threatened him: "I will give you two hours to come with us or I will call all the press and the whole world will find out who you really are." And Maciel let his arm be twisted. After the priests got Maciel to a Legion house in Jacksonville, Florida, he reportedly grew belligerent when Corcuero tried to anoint him, yelling, "I said no!" The article says Maciel refused to make a final confession, and states flatly that he "did not believe in God's pardon." That is an opinion that Maciel's sordid life might well support, but for which, in fact, we have no proof. 

In announcing his ascent to heaven, immediately following Maciel's 2008 death, the Legion high command took propaganda to a level beyond category.

The Mission of Father Maciel

New York Review of Books (excerpt) | June 24, 2010

by Alma Guillermoprieto

Maciel on the cover of Quien magazine (Mexico), March 19, 2010

Of all the terrible sexual scandals the hierarchs in the Vatican find themselves tangled in, none is likely to do more institutional damage than the astounding and still unfolding story of the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel.

The crimes committed against children by other priests and bishops may provoke rage, but they also make one want to look away. With Father Maciel, on the other hand, one can hardly tear oneself from the ghastly drama as it unfolds, page by page, revelation by revelation, in the Mexican press.

Father Maciel, who was born in Mexico and died in 2008 at the age of eighty-seven, was known around the Catholic world. Against ordinarily insurmountable obstacles, he founded what was to become one of the most dynamic, profitable, and conservative religious orders of the twentieth century, which today has almost eight hundred priests and approximately 70,000 men and women around the world who participate in the lay movement Regnum Christi. The Legion of Christ, nearly seventy years old as an order, is comparatively small, but it is influential: it operates fifteen universities, and some 140,000 students are enrolled in its schools (in New York, its members teach in eleven parish schools). And its leadership has long enjoyed remarkable access to the Vatican hierarchy.

A great achiever and close associate of Pope John Paul II, Maciel was also a bigamist, pederast, dope fiend, and plagiarist. He came from the fervently religious state of Michoacán in the southwest of Mexico and grew up during the years of the Cristero War (1926–1929), a savage conflict that pitched traditional Catholics (Cristeros) in provincial Mexico against the anticlerical government in the capital. One of his uncles was the commanding general of the Cristeros. Another four uncles were bishops. One of them, Rafael Guízar Valencia, brought him into a clandestine seminary in Mexico City. As a twenty-year-old who had not even taken his vows, Maciel created a new religious order with the help of another uncle.

... Maciel was evidently a man of some magnetism. Dozens of wealthy women contributed generous amounts for the Legionaries’ good works, and the Mexican magazine Quién, normally known for its society pages and not for its investigative reporting, recently had a story about one of Mexico's wealthiest widows, Flora Barragán de Garza, who donated upward of $50 million during the years of Maciel's glory. “She gave him practically all our father’s fortune,” Barragán’s daughter told the Quién interviewer, adding that the family finally had to intervene so that the by then elderly woman would not be left destitute. Her generosity allowed Maciel to travel first-class throughout his peripatetic life, but it also provided the seed money for the network of private schools to which wealthy Mexican conservatives dispatched their children.

In 1997, Blanca Estela Lara Gutiérrez, a Mexican woman who was living in Cuernavaca, looked at the cover of the magazine Contenido—a Reader’s Digest sort of publication—and saw on it the face of her common-law husband. She had been his partner for twenty-one years and borne him two children, and she knew him as a private detective or “CIA agent” who, for understandable work-related reasons, put in only occasional appearances at home. Now she learned that he was a priest and that his real name was Marcial Maciel. 


He was, the magazine said, the head of an order whose strictness and extreme conservatism appeared to hide some vile secrets: the article, picking up information first brought to light by Gerald Renner and Jason Berry in the Hartford Courant, revealed that nine men—two of whom helped to establish the Legionaries in the US and another still an active member, and the rest all former members of the order—had informed their superiors in Rome that Maciel had abused them sexually when they were pubescent seminarians under his care.

The accusations were not new, nor would they be the last. In 1938 Maciel was expelled from his uncle Guízar’s seminary, and shortly afterward from a seminary in the United States. According to witnesses, Maciel and his uncle had a gigantic row behind closed doors, and one witness, a Legionary who had known Maciel since childhood, told the psychoanalyst Fernando González that the bishop’s rage had to do with the fact that Maciel was locking himself up in the boardinghouse where he was staying with some of the younger boys at his uncle’s seminary.

...Later, it would become known that Maciel had his students and seminarians procure Dolantin (morphine) for him. This led to Maciel’s suspension as head of the order in 1956. Inexplicably, he was reinstated after two years. Much later still, someone realized that his book, The Psalter of My Days, which was more or less required reading in Legionary institutions, and was a sort of Book of Hours, or prayer guide, was lifted virtually in its entirety from The Psalter of My Hours, an account written by a Spaniard who was sentenced to life in prison after the Spanish civil war.

Uneducated and mendacious, Maciel nevertheless had a genius for politics, and for personal relations. But there was more... Maciel’s envoys would regularly deliver envelopes with thousands of dollars in cash to key Church hierarchs. Private audiences with the Pope commanded as much as $50,000 dollars per visit, money that was channeled through Stanislaw Dziwisz, the Polish priest who was the Pope’s private secretary from 1966 until John Paul’s death.

...It is hard not to think that these are the reasons the Vatican ignored the detailed and heart-wrenching letter sent in 1998 by eight of Maciel’s accusers (the ninth member of the group having died). Even as the public first became aware of the accusations through the Hartford Courant and the Mexican press, which picked up the story immediately, the Vatican refused to act. Instead, Pope John Paul II put forward the beatification of Maciel’s mother and of his uncle, Bishop Guízar. (The bishop is now Saint Guízar; Maciel’s mother is still going through the beatification process.) It was only in 2006, after John Paul’s death, that a Vatican communiqué announced that Maciel had been “invited to lead a reserved life of prayer and penitence.” He lived out his final years quietly and died in the United States. The Legionaries, however, have continued to grow in numbers and in wealth.

...Paraguayans have not abandoned their cheerful president, former priest Fernando Lugo, despite the fact that he is known to have fathered at least three children (he seems to think there may be more) while he was still a bishop. Homosexuality has also been tolerated and to some degree almost expected of skirt-wearing priests in this macho part of the (Latin American) world. It is possible, perhaps, that for many Catholics baptism, confession, and weekly mass are almost bureaucratic procedures, like voting or getting a driver’s license, and that true faith is something that happens at homemade altars and through the magical pathways of much older rituals, leaving priests to live their own lives as long as they do a creditable job with the sermons and the burials. The sexual abuse of children and its cover-up are a different matter entirely, one suspects.

As it turns out, Maciel’s common-law marriage to Lara Gutiérrez was not exclusive. Some ten years after he met her, he began a long-lasting relationship with a nineteen-year-old waitress from Acapulco, to whom he introduced himself as an “oil broker.” He had a daughter with her, and, according to a recent article in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, several more children with other partners.

After she found out that her husband was not a CIA agent but a child- molesting priest, Lara Gutiérrez did not come forth with the news that she was married to him. Perhaps she was terrified unawares of the man she believed “was her God,” as she would say a decade later. Perhaps she was simply ashamed. At any rate, she kept silent ...And then, last March, two years after Maciel’s death, Lara Gutiérrez appeared with her three sons on one of Mexico’s most well-regarded talk shows and listened quietly while two of her children testified that their father, Marcial Maciel, had made them masturbate him, and had first attempted to rape them, the older one said, when he was seven years old. (This testimony has been tarnished somewhat by the revelation that the sons had earlier demanded millions of dollars from the Legionaries of Christ in exchange for their silence. The order has not attempted to deny the accusation, however).

We have a double vision of Maciel: we see the saintly figure known to his followers—one long, elegant hand placed on his chest, the other raised in benediction—and, as if through a keyhole, the other, nightmarish, Maciel, demanding that young boys masturbate him and then assuring the shocked, traumatized children that he was authorized by the Vatican to obtain “relief” by this means from dreadful physical pain.

...The Legionaries—that is, Maciel—financed the construction of the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Philip Martyr in Rome, which Maciel intended for his mausoleum. But strikingly, Maciel the priest nearly always staged his pederastic dramas in the infirmary, or sick room (enfermeria) of whatever Legionary seminary he happened to be at, as if this were a place where he could be cured. The masturbatory acts were explained to his victims as a remedy for his pain, but perhaps he truly hoped for healing of some sort in the infirmary. He knew, in any event, how sick he was: he left instructions with his delegates not to start the process of his canonization until thirty years after his death—in the hope, one can guess, that the memory of his sins would be erased by then.

Quite apart from the damage to Maciel’s victims, there is the pressing question of why the Catholic Church, as an institution, did not condemn him when he was ordained as a priest, or when he founded the Legionaries, or when the story of his pederasty made the covers of magazines, or when enough evidence was found for Pope Benedict XVI to conclude that Maciel should live out the rest of his life in seclusion, or even when the rumors grew strong enough to warrant a Vatican investigation of the order as a whole. The answer surprises no one: at a time in which churches are emptying, the Legionaries have been a rich source of conscripts, money, and influence. In Mexico everyone from (billionaire) Carlos Slim to Marta Sahagún, the wife of former president Vicente Fox, gave money to or asked favors from Maciel. It was not until last year that Karol Wojtyla’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, at last authorized a visitation—churchspeak for investigation—of the entire order of the Legion of Christ.

As usual, the press and some disaffected religious have been way ahead of the Vatican. Now we learn from the press that the order kept some nine hundred women under nonbinding vows as consagradas, or quasi nuns, in conditions of severe emotional privation. According to a recent report in Milenio, the women, members of the Regnum Christi, live communally although they are not ordained. They are allowed to see their parents once a year, and spend two weeks with the rest of their family every seven years. They are expected to donate half their material worth after fifteen years of consecration, and donate the full amount after twenty-five. Twice a month they are obligated to have a confession-like conversation with their female superiors, who in turn report on the content of these talks to their own superiors within the Legionaries. The Vatican visitators who conducted the recent investigation of Maciel were allegedly surprised to discover the existence of the consagradas, and to find these and other violations of canonical law in their statutes.

In the end, the scandal of Marcial Maciel, gruesome and grotesque as it is, may turn out to be a scandal of the Catholic Church. There is the distressing question of the Church’s last pope, the popular John Paul II, and his relations with the demonic priest. There is the not unimportant fact that the Legionaries—along with Benedict XVI and indeed John Paul II—represent the most morally conservative part of the Church, and that they now appear enmeshed in squalid moral scandals. There is, above all, the fact that an entire large, wealthy, international institution is now under suspicion (what did Maciel’s fellow Legionaries know, when did they know it, and who was complicit?) and that the greatest institution of all, the Roman Catholic Church, appears to have engaged in a cover-up for decades on its behalf....

...Many priests and nuns, it would seem, opt to “obey” rules but not comply with them, as the Spanish formulation has it (obedezco, pero no cumplo). I offer this simply as anecdotal evidence, but in my casual, friendly, and often admiring acquaintance with members of the Catholic orders—all from the social activist branch of the Church, for whatever it’s worth—a remarkable number have been involved in some sort of couple relationship...(end quote).

Michael Hoffman's Afterword 

These crimes were facilitated in many ways: through bureaucracy, greed and venality, but above all the devil worked through those priests and hierarchs who instilled in the faithful an allegiance to a false understanding of obedience. Beware religious authorities who insinuate that you must obey them rather than God, reversing the Gospel command to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).

This is the lesson to be gleaned from this disgusting and criminal Vatican farrago, as it transpired in the pontificate of Pope John Paul II — and many of the most guilty hierarchs remain in power under Pope Benedict XVI.

Marcial Maciel named his organization the "Legion of Christ" and by his subsequent actions he blasphemed that name, the name above all others, to which every knee shall bow (Philippians 2:10). How any Christian can give allegiance to the Vatican mafia that is still in place and which enabled Maciel's crime spree is beyond rational comprehension, except in terms of the functioning of a cult mentality (Matthew 20: 25-28).

***