`Vows of Silence' authors make their case against John Paul II

The authors, Jason Berry, a journalistic pioneer who exposed sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the 1980s, and Gerald Renner, the former religion writer for The Hartford Courant, make a strong case that Maciel was a serial predator who should have been cast aside long ago but who remained immune to credible accusations because of his clout inside the Vatican of Pope John Paul II.

Among Maciel's staunchest defenders closer to home is Mary Ann Glendon, the Harvard Law School professor whom the pope promoted in March to be the highest-ranking female adviser to the Vatican. Glendon, like other Maciel allies, describes the allegations made by nine former priests and seminarians as slander from disaffected people who left the order embittered.

Berry and Renner paint a portrait of a clueless, isolated Catholic hierarchy that is Orwellian in its absurd embrace of dubious figures like Maciel and its paranoid rejection of good priests like Tom Doyle, the Dominican canon lawyer who was ignored in 1985 when he warned the Vatican that it had to do more about abusive priests, and who was targeted for retribution when he began openly siding with victims. The pope's blindness to the scandal stands in contrast to his noble efforts to acknowledge the corrosive effects of anti-Semitism and authoritarianism as practiced by communists.

"Why did the pontiff most sophisticated in using mass media fail to resolve a crisis so damaging to the church?" the authors ask rhetorically. "The most charitable answer is that John Paul saw no crisis because he had no contact with victims. He cared about them in the abstract; but his vision of the church's purifying truth held no room for a fearless introspection of the clerical state."

The book is an outgrowth of an investigative piece about Maciel and the Legion of Christ that Berry and Renner wrote for the Courant in 1997. Beyond the individual stories of Maciel and Doyle, which have little to do with each other, the book lays the blame for the crisis not at the feet of bishops who enabled abusers by moving them from parish to parish, but at the foot of the Holy See.