The Rev Marcial Maciel, 87, Conservative Catholic Leader, Dies, by Ian Fisher, New York Times, February 1, 2008

The Rev. Marcial Maciel, 87, Conservative Catholic Leader, Dies

By Ian Fisher
New York Times
February 1, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/world/americas/01maciel.html?_r=2&ref=world&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

ROME — The Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the influential Roman Catholic group the Legionaries of Christ and the most prominent priest disciplined after accusations of sexual abuse, died Wednesday, the group announced Thursday. He was 87.

Father Maciel, who was born in Mexico, where he lived most of his life, died at an unspecified location in the United States, the Legionaries said in a statement.

The Rev. Marcial Maciel, of the Legionaries of Christ, being blessed by Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in November 2004.
Photo by Plinio Lepri

Born on March 10, 1920, in Michoacán State, Father Maciel founded the Legionaries in 1941 as a conservative movement active both in training priests and in organizing lay people, and he remained its charismatic leader.

The group, also known as the Legion of Christ, has 650 priests worldwide, 2,500 seminarians in 20 countries and 50,000 members in its lay affiliate, Regnum Christi. The Legionaries run a dozen universities, including their first degree-granting college in the United States, the University of Sacramento.

A friend to many Mexican politicians and business executives, Father Maciel played a major role in several of Pope John Paul II's visits to Mexico. The pope frequently praised him and the Legionaries, calling him an "efficacious guide to youth" during a visit in 1994.

That description prompted several former Legion seminarians to go public with allegations that Father Maciel abused them from the early 1940s to the early '60s, when they were 10 to 16 years old.

Nine of them made their claims public in 1997 in newspaper articles and then a book, "Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II" (Free Press, 2004), by Jason Berry and Gerald A. Renner. One accuser later recanted, calling the allegations fabricated.

Father Maciel repeatedly denied the charges. "I never engaged in the sort of repulsive behavior these men accuse me of," he said in 2002.

But as scandals erupted in the United States involving abuse by priests, the case became a symbol of what critics said was the church's unwillingness to acknowledge the problem or to punish offenders.

In 1999 an inquiry about Father Maciel — who had been investigated in the 1950s for possible drug abuse but cleared — was shelved, reportedly by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was in charge of enforcing church doctrine.

But in late 2004, several months before John Paul died, Cardinal Ratzinger reopened the investigation. He was elected pope in April 2005, taking the name Benedict XVI; the next year, in May, the Vatican issued a rare public censure, addressed to Father Maciel.

Without addressing the charges specifically, the Vatican statement said Father Maciel had been asked to give up his public ministry in favor of a quiet life of "prayer and penitence."

News reports at the time said he had been barred from saying Mass publicly or giving speeches or interviews.

Reaction from the accusers and groups that represent other victims of abuse by priests varied. Some praised the move as a virtual admission of guilt, while others complained that it did not go far enough because there had been no explicit resolution of the charges, and that Father Maciel had not been expelled from the priesthood.

In 2006, Pope Benedict canonized Father Maciel's great-uncle, Bishop Rafael Guizar Valencia, a missionary who had tended to the wounded in the Mexican revolution in 1910. He died in 1938.