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	Vatican Reportedly Rebukes Famed Priest in Sex Scandal By Alan Cooperman San Francisco Chronicle May 19, 2006 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/19/ MNG43IUKP21.DTL&hw=catholic&sn=001&sc=1000 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, the National Catholic Reporter 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." Vatican officials contacted by the Washington Post declined to comment on the report, but a church source confirmed that the Vatican would soon issue a brief statement about Maciel. Maciel is the founder of the Legion of Christ, a worldwide order of more than 650 priests and 2,500 seminarians, and of Regnum Christi, an affiliated movement of lay people that says it has 70,000 members around the world. Both groups are built around the aging priest's "charism," a church term for exceptional spiritual gifts and mission. Thus, a finding that he was not an exemplar of purity, but rather a serial abuser of boys as young as 10, could be devastating to his following. "The real question the Vatican now faces is what do you do about the Legion, an organization that is founded on a lie, a myth about the founder," said Jason Berry, co-author of a 2004 book and forthcoming documentary film, both titled "Vows of Silence," about the Maciel case. Jay Dunlap, a spokesman for the Legion of Christ, said the organization would have no comment pending a formal Vatican statement. "We don't know anything about this," he said. The Legion and its supporters have long maintained that Maciel is an innocent victim of a conspiracy by people opposed to his doctrinal conservatism. The complaints of sexual abuse came to light in the 1990s, when nine former members of the Legion charged that Maciel had molested them from the 1940s into the 1960s. A Vatican investigation was halted in 1999 by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. The case was reopened in 2004, when a church prosecutor collected testimony from more alleged victims.
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