MEXICO
Boston Herald
By Tracy Wilkinson and Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times
Sunday, March 25, 2012
LEON, Mexico — Singing, strumming guitars and trying to shield themselves from a searing sun, tens of thousands of Mexican Catholics came together Saturday nearly 24 hours ahead of an open-air Mass with Pope Benedict XVI.
They walked miles and took up position in Bicentennial Park, a short distance from a hilltop monument that honors the 1920s Cristero War by Catholic counter-revolutionaries.
But as religious fervor was on display here in Silao, in central Mexico’s Guanajuato state, a sexual-abuse scandal involving a notorious Mexican priest threatened to cast a pall on the pope’s first visit to the Spanish-speaking Americas.
At a news conference in nearby Leon to launch a scathing book, sexual-abuse victims and advocates angrily accused the Vatican of protecting the priest, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, for decades. And they said they were dismayed that there were no plans for Benedict to meet victims.
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