Eduardo Verástegui and the Legion of Christ: a soap-opera miracle

Verástegui claims he lived a miraculous religious conversion that brought him back from some sort of abyss into a state of religious ecstasy.

Verástegui's conversion has been marked by his adoption of chastity. His celibate lifestyle has drawn curiosity and coverage from celebrity glossies – enhancing his profile.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Even if his relationship with Patricio Slim Domit is the most relevant connection for any analysis of Eduardo Verástegui’s political profile, it would be deceitful to dismiss the role played by Juan Gabriel Guerra.

Guerra is a member of the Legion of Christ. He was ordained to the priesthood back on Thursday, January 3rd, 1991, at a ceremony presided by Pope John Paul II himself. Guerra was one of 60 deacons turned priests that day.

That Mass capped celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Legionaries of Christ’s founding. The day before, during the General Audience John Paul II said:

It is with great joy that I wish to extend my most cordial welcome to the numerous pilgrims of the Legionaries of Christ. You represent many ecclesial communities, parishes, apostolic groups, educational and assistance centers scattered throughout Mexico, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries. I would like to greet all of you with great affection, hoping that your visit to Rome, the center of Catholicism, confirms and reinforces your faith, your awareness of being the Church of Christ and, at the same time, encourages you to a renewed apostolic dynamism to bring the message of salvation and joy that Jesus has brought us at Christmas to your environments.

During the mass, John Paul II issued a multilingual message. Oddly enough, it is not filed at the Vatican's website as an homily, but as a speech “On the ordination of 60 new priests of the Legionaries of Christ”.

In one of the two paragraphs pronounced in English, the Polish Pope said:

It is Christ who gives each of you a share in the great mission of making his Gospel known through the witness of your lives. May this time of grace inspire you to an ever-deeper commitment to the cause of spreading his Kingdom of salvation, peace, and love.

At the time, the ordination was an expression of Marcial Maciel’s power both inside and outside Mexico. Most of the then newly ordained priests were members of upper-class Mexican families willing to offer one of their own to the Legion, but also able to fund and to help finding other wealthy donors willing to fuel Maciel’s machine.

Some of the members of this cohort rushed their ordination as priests, as a blog specialized on providing details of the many abuses perpetrated by Maciel and the Legion tells its audience.

Juan Gabriel Guerra was then a young Mexican deacon from the state of Guanajuato. Together with other areas of the states of Jalisco and Michoacán shape the so-called Bajío (Lowlands) in Central Mexico. That region was for many years a bishops’ greenhouse of sorts; at least one-half of all the Mexican Roman Catholic bishops active during the 20th century had been born in any of those three states.

Although nowadays the so-called Bajío has been replaced by the seminary in the industrial capital of Mexico, Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo León, as the new “Mexican bishops’ greenhouse”, Guanajuato, Michoacán, and Jalisco remain key territories to understand Mexican Catholic culture. Marcial Maciel himself was born in the early 1920s near the city of Zamora, in Michoacán.

Guerra is currently in charge of the Legion of Christ's youth program at Chacabuco, a relatively small town in the Colina municipality, immediately north of Santiago, the capital of Chile.

Landmarks

He frequently posts pictures of the many activities he leads as a priest. One can see him and his friends and disciples in landmarks in desolated areas of the Chilean mountains, the Andes, but also in places of pilgrimage, from the Way of Saint James in Spain to all the usual landmarks of Catholicism in Rome and other European capitals.

He posts pictures of his encounters with Pope John Paul II, as to emphasize the special link he has with him because of that ceremony back in 1991. In one of said postings, dated (as allowed by Facebook) on January 3rd, 1991, he states in English “I can not (sic) believe a saint made me a priest!”.

But he also posts about his many friends and disciples from the Legion. One of them, probably the most famous is Verástegui. In one of Guerra’s most recent postings, from July 12th, 2023, Verástegui shares the frame with Mel Gibson. The picture sports a watermark with the legend, in Spanish, “Yo amo el santo rosario” (I love the holy Rosary).

Gibson is an increasingly radical Catholic whose father was a key figure in the revolt against the second Vatican Council in their adopted homeland, Australia, back in the 1970s. At some point in his life, Gibson used to travel from California, where he lives, to Hermosillo, Sonora, in Mexico, to meet there with the now defunct former archbishop of that city, Carlos Quintero Arce.

Quintero Arce was by 2007 one of the last bishops consecrated as such with the pre-second Vatican Council ritual, so that made him valuable for Gibson, who thinks the rites brought by the Council are invalid, so the sacraments imparted by said priests and bishops are also invalid.

When Gibson was looking for a bishop who would celebrate the sacrament of confirmation for his grandkids, Quintero Arce was a perfect match, since he was consecrated back on May 14th, 1961, as the bishop of Ciudad Valles, in Mexico.

This even though he as many other Mexican and U.S. bishops from Quintero's generation attended the Council and voted in favor of all the changes that, up until today, make Gibson unhappy.

It is not clear if the ceremony of confirmation followed the pre-Vatican Council II rite since it was performed at Quintero Arce’s private chapel. Quintero Arce, who was by then 87 years old, was amused by Gibson’s love of Latin prayers. The then emeritus archbishop of Hermosillo died nine years later, in 2016.

Prosperity Gospel

Guerra’s postings both in Spanish and English offer a glimpse into the way him and many in the Legion of Christ understand Catholic faith. It is not a faith rooted in Pope Francis’s theology of the people.

Quite the opposite, it is inspired by intuitions derived from the Prosperity Gospel, an understanding of Christianity in which riches and even opulence is not an obstacle to follow Jesus, as in the Gospel passage (Mark 10:17-31) where Jesus expresses dismay at the response from the rich guy who is unwilling to give up all things to follow him, but as the truest expression of God’s love. Opulence, abundance, is the material expression of God’s love.

One of the few posts where opulence is not on display at Father Guerra’s Facebook wall was posted on May 2nd, 2023. That day he posted 13 pictures sharing the frame with “Jim C”, who he introduces to his Facebook friends and followers as “the actor who played Jesus in the movie ‘The Passion’”. In the pictures, Jim C and Father Guerra do some construction work in a rural community in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The C stands for Caviezel, who has a key role in Verástegui most recent film, Sound of Freedom, and who is a household name in the Make America Great Again and the QAnon crowds in the United States.

Caviezel goes, at the end of that movie, into a monologue denouncing the alleged difficulties they faced to bring to completion the movie. He claims they had to overcome roadblocks that are never actually described, and which are hard to believe in an era with so many streaming platforms, willing to broadcast almost any content. More so when one thinks that Patricio Slim (credited as Patrick Slim at the end of the movie), a member of the richest family in Mexico, appears as one of the producers of the film.

It is also worth keeping in mind that, while promoting Sound of Freedom, Verástegui and Caviezel went to Fox News. By the end of the interview Caviezel went as far as to say that Donald Trump was a “new Moses”, leading the chosen people to free the enslaved kids the movie talks about.

Going deeper in Guerra’s timeline, one finds pictures from 2015 promoting the movie Little Boy, one of Verástegui’s previous endeavors. From that movie, Father Guerra gets his only entry at the Internet Movie Data Base, that credits him for providing assistance to the producers of the movie, three in total, with Verástegui as one of them.

The conversion

As far as it is possible to reconstruct Verástegui’s development as some sort of “new-born Catholic”, it was his English language instructor who introduced him to Scott and Kimberly Hahn’s Rome Sweet Home: Our road to Catholicism.

That book is key to understand Verástegui’s approach to Catholicism since the authors are not cradle Catholics. They converted from Presbyterianism to Catholicism. Even if one finds in their understanding many themes common to Catholicism, there are also differences that one should not dismiss and which are a marker of other relatively recent converts to Catholicism in the United States conservative right, as in the case of Ross Douthat.

If one accepts Verástegui’s claims, after reading this book he lived a religious conversion that brought him back from some sort of moral abyss into a state of religious ecstasy.

A marker and product of his alleged conversion is his decision to adopt chastity as a way of living. There is no way to certify the veracity of his frequent claims about the years he has spent without a sexual partner, but that makes for good headlines in Mexican celeb glossy, that for reasons only known to themselves keep providing detailed coverage of Verástegui activities as a politician.

Enter Father Guerra, who was in the early years of this century a relatively young priest, with little more than ten years as such. It would be Guerra who introduced a young but already famous and “hot” Verástegui, then 28 and having a case of work-related burn-out, to Marcial Maciel who took him to Rome.

There, he was able to meet John Paul II back in 2004, when he was barely 30, as this picture, posted by Verástegui in his Facebook timeline on August 12th, 2009, depicts.

In the picture, taken at some point in 2004, it is possible to see Verástegui on his knees before John Paul II, while Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ, a sexual predator who abused his own children, watches them.

Although Verástegui only posted the picture, with no comment or information as to why he was doing so, it is possible to assume that he was joining the drive to support the rushed beatification of the Polish Pope.

As a meme of its own, the picture is used to highlight to Verástegui, his supporters and followers, the many contradictions of his alleged religious conversion, rooted in his relationship with a noted sexual predator. More recently, it has been used to highlight the potential contradiction of his alleged commitment against the kidnapping and abuse of minors, the central theme of Sound of Freedom.

The complexities of said commitment were stressed last week when we knew about the arrest on charges of the kidnapping of a 14-year-old kid of Fabian Marta, who put some money into a crowdfund drive to support the production of Sound of Freedom. Marta has made a name for himself as the producer of so-called “Sugar Ball” parties at the Saint Louis Missouri, metro area.

These parties are promoted on several social media sites as opportunities “to see the green”. That is how Ciggfreeds Liquid and Lace, an adult business in the Saint Louis Missouri metro area promoted on Facebook the party organized by Fabian Marta at the Lucas Park Grille restaurant on February 10th, 2020.

Scandal

The 2004 picture of Verástegui holding John Paul II's hand while Maciel watches them, reposted in 2009, was part of the drive to push for the Polish Pope's rushed beatification.

In April 2009, Wojtyla’s former secretary and then archbishop of Kraków, Stanisław Dziwisz informed the media about a miracle. By October, the then mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno was talking about the huge crowds he was expecting to attend the beatification, although—ultimately—the ceremony will happen until May 1st, 2011.

It is worth noting that Dziwisz himself was accused on October 2020 of covering up sexual abuse perpetrated by Jan Wodinak, who was barred from publicly performing as a priest in 2017. Dziwisz would be cleared from these accusations later, on April 2022.

Verástegui's close relationship with Maciel, Guerra, and the Legion of Christ opened a path for him. On the one hand, that path led him to that picture turned a meme on its own right, with Maciel and John Paul II.

But it would be naïve to dismiss the fact that it also brought him close to the most conservative elements of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the USCCB. Hence the implicit endorsement coming from Cardinal Raymond Burke, patent in the pictures showing them together, posted and reposted as required by Verástegui’s active public agenda, and amplified by his followers on social media.

However, what is relevant is that these associations with Guerra, Maciel, and, ultimately, with John Paul II himself, have helped Verástegui's drive to become the voice of radical conservatism in Mexico and Latin America.

One can see him smoking cigars in carefully choreographed pictures in social media with Santiago Abascal Conde, the leader of the neofascist Vox party in Spain.

And there are the more casual pictures with politicians with known associations with the Opus Dei, as in the case of the President of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, or the open endorsement of Rafael López Aliaga, current mayor of Lima, the capital of Peru, when he was, back on 2021, a candidate in the Presidential elections in that country.

Next week I will continue tracing Verástegui's political career in Mexico.