My will be done, a deep dive into Marcial Maciel’s psyche

Garza Martínez’s script offers also an accurate understanding of the perverse exchanges between the Mexican, Spaniard, and U.S. elites with Maciel.

A major merit of Garza Martínez’s play is how it debunks the very notion of the abominable lone predator, the Catholic Church’s favorite folktale to avoid its institutional responsibility for predators such as Maciel.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Deep in the YouTube archives there is a hidden treasure for those willing to take a plunge into the delusional imagination of a predator clergyman. Written by Mexican playwright Alicia Garza Martínez.

The video is not good if you just want to evade reality. Cable TV and YouTube itself, have plenty of that. Garza Martínez offers a deep dive into the dungeons of Marcial Maciel’s delusional persona. Hers is not a Mexican telenovela nor a ticket to Lalaland.

It is a carefully built portrayal of the onion of sorts that was Maciel’s and almost any predator’s mind. It is an accurate representation of how predators, whether cassocked or with any other claim to fame, prestige or respectability. It is an account of how they believe that whatever evil, damage and doom they have brought to their victims is nothing compared to their alleged contributions to the realms, the institutions, they used to play Jesus.

As with other plays dealing with the intricacies of clergy sexual abuse, My will be done (Hágase mi voluntad) is an attempt to look at the eyes of the beast, to understand the reasons behind its evil, its banality. As such, it is a cautionary tale for the Catholic Church, other Christian churches, other religions and any other institution at risk of being captured by narcissists.

The video is a live theater recording, little less than an hour, of a production of David Adrián García Garza, as staged at El Círculo Teatral (The Theatrical Circle) in Mexico City, back on June 28, 2025.

The sole character, that of Marcial Maciel is played by Francisco De Luna, who does a great job with a very simple stage design with an armchair, a chest, some papers, a bottle and a glass and a rug.

De Luna does his best to portray Maciel having a nightmare, probably in the last days of his life in Florida, battling there, as a Mexican Ebenezer Scrooge with the ghosts of his own convoluted past, starting with his mommy dearest, Ms. Maurita, all the way up to his beloved John Paul II, with some disparaging lines, fitting the character, for “Ratzinger!”

As it is usually the case with many actual predators, De Luna does a great job when conveying Maciel’s anger towards the so-called “God’s rottweiler” even if, who ever has followed the misadventures of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, Benedict XVI was weak enough to retain Maciel as a priest, even if he slapped the predator’s priest by “punishing” him to a “life of prayer.”

Early in the play, one sees De Luna’s rendition of Maciel’s spite for Joseph Ratzinger, threatening him in the labyrinth of the nightmare to spill the beans about the many abuses of Georg, Ratzinger’s brother, the now deceased priest and choirmaster who, now we know, at least tolerated abuse with his almighty brother’s consent.

In that respect, Garza Martínez’s portrayal of Maciel’s nightmare is an accurate description of what we know about the “last Maciel,” the elderly Whitexican lost in the immense corridors of luxury malls in Southern Florida, compulsively spending a fortune amassed in Mexico, mocking Ratzinger’s punishment and the weak structures of the Catholic Church in Southern Florida, archbishop John Clement Favalora of Miami in the first row.

As it was the case in Santiago de Chile when Fernando Karadima remained an active priest, with a flock of his own, despite Benedict XVI’s “sanctions”, Maciel was able to keep “livin’ La Vida Loca”, bragging his impunity in those malls and in many other venues, without any semblance of penance or even having second thoughts about the consequences of his abuse.

Garza Martínez’s script offers also an excellent understanding of the kind of perverse exchanges between the Mexican, Spaniard, and U.S. elites with Maciel. That is perhaps, the key realization many in the Catholic world are still unwilling to accept: predators are the byproduct of environments that facilitate and even encourage inequality in social interactions. That is more dangerous in religious settings where, at least in theory, all are the sons and daughters of a loving God.

The Mexican priest offered them access to John Paul II and the Roman curia, and they were more than willing to reward their brokerage in the Vatican, even if it was for nothing else than the dubious privilege of pretending some closeness to Karol Wojtyla.

Another merit in Garza Martínez’s book is the way she describes Maciel’s delusion of rendering himself as the proverbial “alter Christus” of yore, not because of his own merits, but because he was “able” to portray whatever objection to his abuse as some sort of persecution.

A son of the Mexican Lowlands, inebriated with the dubious idea of being the son, nephew and cousin of martyrs of the so-called Cristero War (La Cristiada), the Mexican religion war of 1926-9, Maciel found a public gullible enough to believe the many lies of him fighting that war when he was a toddler.

There emerges one of the saddest aspects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, not only in the Mexican Lowlands, where one still finds sellers of snake oil claiming to be direct descendants of Cristeros, the guerrilla troopers fighting La Cristiada, but all over the world.

Whether one looks at Maciel, at Karadima in Chile, at Carlos Miguel Buela in Argentina, or at Luis Fernando Figari in Peru, all of them perfected the art of playing victim, while taking hostages the sons and daughters of their overconfident flock, way too convinced of the holiness of these predators to ever question if they were really the victims of “communist” cabals intent in destroying them and the Church of Christ.

De Luna’s Maciel proves how seasoned he is an actor. One needs to be a well-trained thespian to utter many of Maciel’s lines without choking at the infinite contradictions contained in almost any sentence written by Garza Martinez and delivered by the protagonist.

Unlike the rather wasteful HBO’s Maciel, the Wolf of God, which was the subject of a full entry in the series dealing with clergy sexual abuse, Garza Martínez’s is extremely careful at conveying the very impossibility of the abominable lone predator, the Catholic Church’s favorite folktale when trying to avoid its institutional responsibility for the many abuses of its own flock.

The video of the play is available immediately after this paragraph. Over YouTube it is possible to access subtitles automatically generated, as De Luna’s diction is perfect and the sound design, as much as the lighting allowing for an experience as good as possible when dealing with these issues.

Audio available only in Spanish. English subtitles are available over at the YouTube Control Panel.

My only suggestion (and expectation) is that after rather short runs at different venues in Mexico City and Monterrey back in 2025, this play could find a venue or venues as to allow the public to have the opportunity to experience it as Alicia Garza Martínez originally wrote her piece, in a proper theatre.