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	Vatican Disciplines Priest over Sex Scandal in Mexico By Tracy Wilkinson Chicago Tribune May 20, 2006 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0605200081may20,1,3690657.story?coll= chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true Rome - The Vatican announced Friday that it was disciplining the Mexican founder of an influential Catholic order after an investigation into decades of allegations that the now-elderly priest sexually abused boys in his care. Rev. Marcial Maciel appears to be the highest-ranking priest to be sanctioned in an abuse case. Maciel enjoyed protective support from the 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, and his organization, the Legion of Christ, repeated that position 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 the pope, who has vowed to rid the church of the "filth" that sexual abuse represents, approved the sanctions that were determined by his successor as head of the body that led the inquiry, the former archbishop of San Francisco, Cardinal William Levada. 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 pope, reopened the inquiry after church investigators received testimony in late 2004 and early 2005 from at least 20 new accusers who said they were abused by Maciel well into the 1980s, according to the National Catholic Reporter news agency, which first reported the Vatican's decision on Thursday. Some of the first to report abuse were not pleased, saying the punishment was inadequate and was overdue. "This was a minimal punishment ... meager and mediocre ... that does not respond to the magnitude of the denunciations," Alejandro Espinosa, an alleged victim, told La Jornada newspaper in Mexico City.
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