Disgracing a priest and second-guessing a pope

ON MAY 19, Pope Benedict XVI disgraced one of the most powerful priests in the Roman Catholic Church, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the ultraconservative Legion of Christ. Benedict's decision to publicly discipline the priest came after an investigation into allegations that Maciel had sexually abused "more than 20 and less than 100 victims" in seminary, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

On the face of it, the pope's "invitation" to Maciel to give up his public ministry in favor of a quiet life of "prayer and penitence" may not seem a terribly harsh punishment for an alleged serial sex abuser. But in doing so, Benedict did something extraordinarily unusual: He cast doubt on his predecessor's judgment.

The culture of apostolic succession invites each new pope to be exquisitely respectful of the popes who came before him. Historians now must scramble to explain why the late Pope John Paul II, who called for the church to atone for institutional sins by "the purification of historical memory," sheltered Maciel for years. Utterly ignoring the pleas of Maciel's victims that the priest be held to account, John Paul praised him instead. In late 2004, the pope celebrated Maciel for his "integral formation of the person" even as the sexual-abuse charges against him, dating from 1976, gathered dust in the Vatican.

In late 2004, the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who has since become pope, clearly distanced himself from the dying John Paul by ordering an investigation of the allegations against Maciel. Under Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has historically tried theologians who publicly questioned church doctrines, had been dealing with hundreds of cases of pedophile priests whose bishops wanted them laicized. Ratzinger wanted to move Maciel's case to the top of the list. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's secretary of state, pressured Ratzinger to ignore a 1998 canon-law suit seeking Maciel's ouster. But Ratzinger realized that Maciel loomed as a potential scandal for the next pope. Sodano will soon retire.

In 1997, Gerald Renner and I wrote an investigation of sexual-abuse allegations against Maciel, profiling nine of his accusers, that was published in the Hartford Courant. Maciel declined to be interviewed for the piece, but he asserted his innocence in a statement. His lawyers threatened the newspaper with legal action and bombarded editors with documents seeking to discredit the accusers. In response to our requests for comment, the Vatican made no assertion of Maciel's innocence, not even a "no comment."