c. 2008 Religion News Service

Accused priest Marcial Maciel dies at 87

VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of a conservative movement of Roman Catholic priests and laity who was disciplined by the pope amid charges of sexual abuse, died Wednesday (Jan. 30) at the age of 87.

The Mexican priest died of “natural causes” in an unspecified location in the United States, according to a joint statement by the Legionaries of Christ (or Legion of Christ), the religious congregation he founded in 1941, and its affiliated lay movement, Regnum Christi.

Funeral rites would be “quiet and private” in accordance with Maciel’s wishes, the statement said.

The Legionaries of Christ, which enjoyed Vatican favor under Pope John Paul II, claims more than 600 priests and 2,500 seminarians in 40 countries, including at least 75 priests in the United States. Regnum Christi reportedly has some 65,000 lay members.

In 1997, nine former Legionaries accused Maciel of sexually abusing them decades earlier, when they were studying to become priests under his authority.

The allegations set off a drawn-out Vatican investigation conducted by the office of then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) from 1998 to 2005.

In 2006, with Benedict’s approval, Maciel was asked to limit himself to a “life reserved to prayer and penitence, renouncing all public ministry.”

The Vatican did not release details from the investigation, and Maciel was spared a church trial, a proceeding that could have resulted in his permanent removal from the priesthood.

The Vatican said at the time that Benedict had decided not to try Maciel because of his advanced age.

The Legionaries responded with a statement that Maciel had accepted the pontiff’s decision as a “new cross that God, the Father of Mercy, has allowed him to suffer and that will obtain many graces for the Legion of Christ.”

Barbara Dorris, outreach director of the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) called Maciel “one the world’s most prominent and powerful predatory priests,” and expressed the hope that “his passing brings some relief and closure to those he has so severely injured and are still suffering.”

_ Francis X. Rocca

Human Rights Watch blasts U.S. on Kenya violence

WASHINGTON (RNS) As blood continues to be spilled on Kenyan streets in fierce protest of the disputed presidential elections in late December, the head of Human Rights Watch demanded that the U.S. government take more responsibility for that violence.

“It’s easy to see why every two-bit tyrant around the world thinks he may qualify as a democrat,” Kenneth Roth said Thursday (Jan. 31), in releasing the group’s annual report on human rights. “Kenya is the latest example of that.”

The dominant theme of the group’s 2008 report is that the United States and other influential Western democracies undermine human rights by allowing countries, such as Kenya and Pakistan, to pose as democracies while holding flawed elections and violating other civil rights.

The yearly report is the culmination of the researchers’ opinions based on interviews with citizens and officials in more than 75 countries. Human Rights Watch is an independent, nonprofit organization that started in 1978.

Though the presidential elections sent Kenya into political turmoil, Chris Albin-Lackey, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in Kenya, said the U.S. government could be doing much more to end the violent revolt.

“The U.S. cannot just simply turn away from a crisis like this,” Albin-Lackey said, “while still trying to cultivate the relationship (between the U.S. and Kenyan governments) and influence events.”

The U.S. government has substantial leverage over the Kenyan government because of the amount of aid money it contributes to Kenya, Albin-Lackey said. They also have a close relationship because of shared counterterrorism objectives, he said.

Sean McCormack, spokesman for the State Department, said in a briefing Wednesday that Washington is monitoring the situation. Though most humanitarian money will continue to be sent to Kenya, he said, there are some counterterrorism funds that are being reviewed and may be withheld.

“It will be an issue that is dealt with down the road,” McCormack said.

_ Greg Trotter

Pope defends statement on uniqueness of Catholic Church

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday (Jan. 31) defended a controversial Vatican statement on the uniqueness of the Catholic church, saying that it would enhance, not derail, ecumenical dialogue.

Benedict made his remarks in a meeting with members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church’s highest doctrinal body.

The pope commended the Congregation on a document it published last July, which reaffirms the teaching that the “one Church of Christ … subsists in the Catholic Church” alone.

The document describes non-Catholic Christian churches as defective, and says that Protestant denominations are not even churches “in the proper sense.”

Although some Protestant leaders criticized the Congregation’s statement upon its release, the pope on Thursday insisted that it would facilitate dialogue between Catholics and other Christians.

“Far from impeding authentic ecumenism, it will help ensure that discussion of doctrinal questions be undertaken always with realism and full awareness of the aspects that still separate Christian confessions,” Benedict said.

The Pope also praised another Congregation document, published last Dec. 14, which said that Catholic missionaries should aim to win souls and not restrict themselves to humanitarian good works.

Respect for other religions and a “spirit of collaboration” with their adherents “must not be understood as a limitation on the missionary task of the church, which requires it incessantly to announce Christ as the way, the truth and the life,” the pope said.

Looking ahead to a document still in preparation, Benedict encouraged the Congregation in its current focus on issues of bioethics, including research on embryonic stem cells and the possibility of human cloning.

“The two fundamental criteria for moral discernment in this field,” said the pope, are “unconditional respect for the human being as a person, from conception to natural death,” and “respect for the originality of transmission of human life through the proper acts of spouses.”

_ Francis X. Rocca

Quote of the Day: Episcopal Bishop John Howe of Central Florida

(RNS) “The litigation going on in so many places is a travesty. And although some seem to be trying to do so, I don’t think you can hold a church together by taking everybody you disagree with to court.”

_ Episcopal Bishop John Howe of Central Florida on the legal battles between the Episcopal Church and conservatives who’ve seceded over homosexuality and the Bible. He was quoted by The Living Church.

KRE DS END RNS