Vatican will discipline noted priest
ROME – The Vatican announced Friday that it was disciplining the Mexican founder of an influential Catholic order following an investigation into decades of allegations that the now-elderly priest sexually abused boys in his care.
Father Marcial Maciel appears to be the highest-ranking priest to be sanctioned in an abuse case. Maciel enjoyed protective support from the late Pope John Paul II for many years, but Pope Benedict XVI, in his first major decision in the church’s sex-abuse scandal, put aside his predecessor’s wishes.
Maciel has denied the allegations in the past, and his organization, the Legion of Christ, repeated that position on Friday.
The Vatican said in a statement that Maciel, 86, has been instructed to refrain from all public ministries and to adopt a “life of prayer and penitence.” The statement did not specify whether the charges were true, but experts said the Vatican’s decision indicated that church investigators believed at least some of the accusations.
Given his advanced age and frail health, the statement added, Maciel will not be prosecuted under canonical law.
The Vatican said Benedict, who has vowed to rid the church of the “filth” that sexual abuse represents, personally approved the sanctions.
Despite persistent rumors about Maciel’s behavior for decades, including alleged drug abuse as far back as the mid-1950s, the case against him took years to advance in the labyrinthine legal bureaucracy of the Vatican. Originally, eight men accused Maciel of sodomizing them when they were students under the priest’s supervision in the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. Most of the accusers were Mexican, some as young as 10 years old when their alleged ordeals began.
An investigation was suspended by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1999. But Ratzinger, now the pope, reopened the inquiry after church investigators received testimony in late 2004 and early 2005 from at least 20 new accusers, who asserted that they were abused by Maciel well into the 1980s, according to the National Catholic Reporter news agency.