JASON BERRY

Going deep behind the headlines about scandals in the Catholic Church, Jason Berry and Gerald Renner follow the staggering trail of evasions and deceit that leads directly to the Vatican and taints the legacy of Pope John Paul II.Based on more than six years of investigative reporting and hundreds of interviews, Vows of Silence is a riveting account of Vatican cover-ups. Both a profound criticism and a wake-up call to reform by two Catholic writers, this book reveals an agenda of top-down control under John Paul II and a hierarchy so obsessed with secrecy as to spawn disinformation.Vows of Silence cuts between the life story of Father Tom Doyle, who sacrificed a diplomatic career with the Vatican to seek justice for sex-abuse victims, and Father Marcial Maciel, an accused pedophile and founder of the militaristic religious order, the Legion of Christ. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Father Doyle and with ex-Legionaries who filed a canonical suit against Maciel, as well as interviews with Vatican insiders and an array of sources in Mexico, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, Berry and Renner provide a penetrating account of a hierarchy directly in conflict with its followers.With keen insight and scrupulous reporting, Vows of Silence is a powerful narrative that chronicles the churchs struggle between orthodoxy and reformgoing straight to the heart of one of the worlds largest power structures. It is not a book about sexual abuse; it is a book about abuse of power throughout the Vatican.

This journalistic expose of the gay-priest culture in the Catholic church looks back to the 1970s to uncover how the ground was laid for the current abuses within that institution. The authors are bo

El título del libro alude, metafóricamente, a los votos de pobreza, castidad y obediencia que juran seguir los miembros de las órdenes religiosas dentro de la iglesia católica. El voto de silencio no solo es indicativo del abuso de poder por parte de los propios perpetradores, sino del Vaticano, que ha hecho caso omiso de los reclamos de cientos de victimas y, por el contrario, ha otorgado un espaldarazo a personajes como el padre Marcial Maciel, fundador de Los Legionarios de Cristo y quien desde la decada de los cuarenta, por lo menos, ha estado envuelto en acusaciones de abuso sexual.En la mejor tradicion del gran periodismo estadounidense, Votos de silencio mezcla dos generos con gran fortuna: el reportaje y el ensayo periodistico. Ejemplo de ello son la multiplicidad de fuentes, asi como una gran cantidad de entrevistas con los protagonistas de la historia, rigor en la precision de los datos y una prosa que linda constantemente en el aliento literario.Ademas, interesantes cronicas de la vida de hombres contrastantes: el sacerdote estadounidense, de origen irlandes, Thomas P. Doyle, un padre dominico con experiencia como abogado en derecho canonico, quien asi se desempeño a principios de los ochenta en la Embajada Vaticana en Washington, DC, y el citado Marcial Maciel, originario de Cotija, Michoacan, quien ha desplegado una red inmensa de escuelas en Estados Unidos, Europa y America Latina donde se han formado prominentes figuras de la politica, la economia y las artes.Pocas personalidades tan contrastantes como Doyle y Maciel al interior de la iglesia catolica. El primero vivio los efectos y las promesas emanadas del Concilio Vaticano Segundo, una piedra de toque en la historia del catolicismo. Desde hace decadas, Doyle se ha dedicado a documentar, registrar y combatir los miles de casos de abuso sexual en Estados Unidos, que fueron objeto de una gran difusion por parte de los medios informativos en 2002. El dominico, se convirtio rapidamente en una voz privilegiada que denuncio casos sobre los que tenia informacion de primera mano recogida gracias a su contacto con las victimas.

AN INVESTIGATION OF EPIC FINANCIAL INTRIGUE, RENDER UNTO ROME EXPOSES THE SECRECY AND DECEIT THAT RUN COUNTER TO THE VALUES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.The Sunday collection in every Catholic church throughout the world is as familiar a part of the Mass as the homily and even Communion. There is no doubt that historically the Catholic Church has been one of the great engines of charity in history. But once a dollar is dropped in that basket, where does it go? How are weekly cash contributions that can amount to tens of thousands of dollars accounted for? Where does the money go when a diocese sells a church property for tens of millions of dollars? And what happens when hundreds of millions of dollars are turned over to officials at the highest ranks, no questions asked, for their discretionary use? The Roman Catholic Church is the largest organization in the world. The Vatican has never revealed its net worth, but the value of its works of art, great churches, property in Rome, and stocks held through its bank easily run into the tens of billions. Yet the Holy See as a sovereign state covers a mere 108 acres and has a small annual budget of about $280 million.No major book has examined the churchs financial underpinnings and practices with such journalistic force. Today the church bears scrutiny by virtue of the vast amounts of money (nearly $2 billion in the United States alone) paid out to victims of clergy abuse. Amid mounting diocesan bankruptcies, bishops have been selling off whole pieces of the infrastructurechurches, schools, commercial propertieswhile the nephew of one of the Vaticans most powerful cardinals engaged in a lucrative scheme to profiteer off the enormous downsizing of American church wealth.