San Francisco Chronicle
Alan Cooperman, Washington Post
Friday, May 19, 2006
After a fitful, decade-long investigation of sex abuse allegations, Pope Benedict XVI has disciplined the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, an elderly Mexican priest who was close to Pope John Paul II and is venerated by many Catholics around the world, a Catholic newspaper reported Thursday.
In a dispatch from Rome, theAbuse Tracker said the pope has restricted Maciel's capacity to celebrate public Masses, to give lectures or other public presentations, and to speak to the news media.
The action "amounts to a finding that at least some of the accusations against the charismatic 86-year-old Mexican priest are well-founded," NCR's Vatican correspondent John L. Allen Jr. wrote, calling Maciel "perhaps the highest-profile priest in the Catholic Church to be disciplined for allegations of sexual abuse."