The Engine of Corruption: The Case of Marcial Maciel
I was watching a documentary about Marcial Maciel. Later that day, stretched out in the bath, a thought came to me: here was a man who had built an empire out of nothing, a priest who rose from obscurity to command schools, universities, seminaries, and a global religious order that counted its wealth in the hundreds of millions.
And yet, beneath it all, he was a fraud: a drug addict, a sexual predator, a man who lived multiple secret lives while cloaking himself in the aura of holiness.
At first, I tried to separate the two: the empire and the abuse, the genius and the crime. But the more I thought, the clearer it became: they could not be separated. One would not have been possible without the other.
Maciel’s compulsions were not incidental to his rise - they were the very fuel of it. His addictive personality, which tethered him to Demerol injections, also gave him relentless drive. His gift for manipulating victims was the same gift he used to seduce donors, cardinals, and politicians. His shameless ability to lie about his secret families and habits was the same shamelessness that allowed him to smash through ecclesiastical barriers and build the Legionaries of Christ at lightning speed.
The mask of sanctity that hid his crimes was the very mask that made his empire so attractive. The aura of suffering and discipline he projected gave him access to the hearts and wallets of the faithful, while ensuring his double life remained invisible. He was not both saint and sinner. He was not both builder and destroyer. He was all of these at once, the contradictions welded together into a single, terrifying personality.
That is the strange fascination of men like Maciel. You cannot admire them without recoiling, and you cannot condemn them without acknowledging their undeniable achievements. Their greatness and their corruption are inseparable. They are proof that genius can feed on vice, that empire and fraud can grow together like two sides of the same organism.
And then the question comes: what does this mean for us? Is this not a pattern - though usually less grotesque - that repeats itself in the lives of the powerful everywhere? The rulers who charm crowds while hiding appetites that corrode them. The magnates who build fortunes while entangled in scandal. The princes and presidents whose masks slip only long after the damage is done.
How many empires are built on the same raw materials of charm, manipulation, shamelessness, and hidden compulsion?
How much of what we admire in power is secretly bound up with what we would despise if only we saw it clearly?
That is where the thought leaves me: uneasy, watching the masks around us, and wondering how much of our faith in leaders is faith in illusions we already suspect will collapse.