“The time is fast approaching when everything that is covered up will be revealed, and all that is secret will be made known to all,” Jesus warned. His words could very well apply to the dark deeds of iconic Catholic clergy that are buried deep in the entrails of 85 kilometers of the Vatican’s Secret Archives.

In March 2020, when Pope Francis ordered the opening of the Pius XII (1939–1958) archives, he almost certainly knew that historians would shred his predecessor’s already-disputed reputation as a pontiff who acquiesced to Hitler and Mussolini during the Nazi and Fascist regimes.

Historians weren’t going to worry their footnote-filled heads about how Pius XII and his curial cardinals dealt with notorious clerical sex offenders — not unless they were among the many cardinals, bishops, and priests who openly collaborated with the Nazis and Fascists.

But fresh tidbits keep popping up from the estimated 16 million pages, and the latest to capture media attention is the ambivalent approach Pius XII took to Mexican-born Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado — the founder of the ultraconservative Legionaries of Christ and the Regnum Christi movement.

Maciel’s Mega-Misdeeds

Hailed as “the greatest fundraiser of the modern Roman Catholic church,” Maciel was a drug addict and serial pedophile who sexually abused at least 20 seminarians and more than 60 minors between the 1940s and the 1970s. He fathered three children by at least two women, and even raped his own sons.

And the Legionaries replicated Maciel’s crimes. A 2019 investigation identified 33 priests and 71 seminarians in the order who had sexually abused minors over the past eight decades. One-third of the clerical predators were themselves Maciel’s victims.

Maciel forced his Legionaries to take private vows, never to speak ill of him, and to snitch on anyone who did. The cult-like order vilified abused ex-Legionaries after they made their accusations public. Only in 2009 did its leaders sharply reverse course, acknowledging that Maciel had sired several children.

Four popes who knew of his egregious misdeeds looked the other way for more than 50 years. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI gave the 85-year-old Maciel a penalty amounting to a slap on the wrist, restricting him to a “life of prayer and repentance.” The serial predator died in 2008.

Bombshell from the Archives

On Sunday, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera’s cultural supplement La Lettura sparked a media storm after reporting that Pius XII, the last “traditionalist” pontiff, knew about Maciel’s misconduct. The newspaper unearthed from the archives an Oct. 1, 1956, memo from Archbishop Giovanni Battista Scapinelli, the No. 3 in the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious ordering Maciel to go into detox.

The original draft penned by Scapinelli reads: “I will order him to get treated, to abandon any contact with his students until the congregation says otherwise. And if he doesn’t show up, in two days, a pre-emptive order should be given to Maciel: Either you go get treated or you will remain suspended a divinis” (a censure depriving a cleric entirely or partially of his office).

The second paragraph of the draft, kept in a folder marked “Male religious orders,” states: “For reasons known to the Holy Father he was suspended from the office of Superior.” Note, Pius XII did not suspend Maciel from the priesthood but from his position as superior of the Legionaries.

A subsequent draft of the memo was published in 2012 by Maciel’s Mexican victims on the Spanish website La Voluntad De No Saber (“The Will Not to Know”). The draft shows that Scapinelli had scratched out his original order barring Maciel from having contact with his seminarians and only ordered him to get treatment for his addiction.

The draft contains an extra page and a half of Scapinelli’s handwritten notes recounting a meeting between Maciel and Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, which took place on October 2, 1956.

Prohibitions Deleted

In addition to the above two drafts, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State archives contain a final version of the memo, dated Oct. 2, 1956, omitting any prohibition from contact with seminarians or threat of suspension, and only requiring Maciel to seek medical treatment.

The restrictions on Maciel disappear after the meeting with Pizzardo, an ultratraditionalist prelate who was secretary of the Holy Office (of the Inquisition) at the time and widely known in the Vatican by the nickname “Rasputin.”

Maciel responded to the Vatican order on October 3, 1956, describing his health as “satisfactory” and attaching a medical certificate. Nevertheless, he agreed to “humbly” obey and seek treatment. The predator concluded by portraying himself as the victim of a “slanderous accusation” and furnishing a list of properties purchased by his Legionaries of Christ, bragging about his success in fundraising.

Massimo Franco, who broke the story in the La Lettura, points to Pizzardo as Maciel’s “great protector.” Historians describe Pizzardo’s massive influence on Pius XII. Pizzardo was present when Pius XII (then Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli) signed the reichsconcordat with Hitler in 1933.

“Elephantine Psychosis for Power”

Pro-fascist Pizzardo was also “a favorite of Pius XI but unpopular with many in the Vatican who linked his influence to his access to American Catholic money,” Prof. David Kertzer observes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe.

His own friends lamented his “morbid and elephantine psychosis for power and bureaucratic office,” writes Kertzer, noting that “Pizzardo became the pope’s main conduit for these American funds.” Pizzardo was so influential that Cardinal Bonaventura Cerretti, Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, called Pius XII a “slave in the hands of Pizzardo, who moves him like a puppet.”

Many traditionalist Catholics who regard Pius XII as the last pope who championed the “true faith” before they say it was watered down by the popes of Vatican II not only give him a pass for capitulating to the pagan religio-political ideologies of Fascism and Nazism (as I write here), but also ignore his record on clerical sex abuse (much of which is now coming to light in the archives).

Pius XII’s Record on Clergy Sex Abuse

When Pacelli was Secretary of State, he took care of a thorny issue that was surfacing in the relationship between Nazi Germany and the Vatican: Hundreds of priests in Germany and Austria had been charged with sexual abuse, including the abuse of minors.

A folder in the recently opened archives is labeled: “Vienna: Order to burn all archival material concerning cases of immorality of monks and priests.”

Was the Reich using such cases to blackmail the Vatican? We may never know because the Vatican still refuses to let scholars examine its files on the clerical sex abuse of that period (or other periods).

In the same folder, another note orders the bishops’ curias and archives of the congregations and orders in Austria that “all the material regarding cases of immorality of priests is immediately and without exception burned and also the numbers of the protocols cancelled. … The matter is extremely delicate but very urgent.”

After becoming pope at the first of his secret meetings in May 1939 with Prince Philipp von Hessen — who was the key player in the regular negotiations between Hitler and Pius XII — the duo discussed the clerical sex abuse crisis. “No one knows we’re having this conversation. Even my closest associates don’t know about it,” the pope assured the prince.

Cult of Priestly Predators

Ironically, those who tout the Latin Mass as the silver bullet that will save the Catholic Church and smear Vatican II as the Trojan horse that brought in the evils of modernism, religious pluralism, and sexual immorality within the priesthood fail to see that the vast majority of the Church’s most notorious clerical predators were all ordained before Vatican II and piously celebrated the Latin Mass.

The list is endless, beginning with ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. A chilling report published in June 2023 reveals how 72 priests and six nuns from the Community of Saint John used a rogue theology to sexually abuse 30 nuns, 69 laywomen, 29 minors, 17 brothers and 10 boys under the age of 15.

The report admits the “central role” the order’s founder, Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe, played in the “systemic” abuse and notes that the priest raped 20 women, including multiple nuns.

The founder of the community, who like Maciel was revered by many of his disciples as a “saint,” sanctioned a “third way” of relationships between men and women of “loving friendship” which involved a sexual dimension “alongside marriage or consecrated celibacy.” In other words: He was endorsing extramarital sexual partnerships, putting a spiritual spin on sin.

A “spider web” of relationships was formed between predator priests that involved Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe and his brother Fr. Thomas Philippe, who also serially abused nuns and lay women.

“Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops,” Jesus prophesied. Yea, even on the front pages of secular newspapers and on social media, Our Lord might well have warned.

 

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.