{{The Vatican on Wednesday ordered a disgraced Scottish cardinal to leave Scotland for several months to pray and atone for sexual misconduct, issuing a rare public sanction against a “prince of the church” and the first such punishment meted out by Pope Francis.}}
Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned as archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh and recused himself from the March conclave that elected Francis pope after a newspaper reported unnamed priests’ allegations that he acted inappropriately toward them.
O’Brien subsequently acknowledged he had engaged in unspecified sexual misbehavior.
He apologized and promised to stay out of the church’s public life.
On Wednesday, the Vatican said O’Brien, once Britain’s highest-ranking Catholic leader, would leave Scotland for several months of “spiritual renewal, prayer and penance” for the same reasons he decided not to participate in the conclave.
The statement didn’t specify that the decision was imposed on O’Brien by the Vatican as punishment, and in fact went out of its way to suggest that the decision was O’Brien’s.
But in the past, wayward priests have been sanctioned by the Vatican with punishments of “prayer and penance,” and the statement made clear Francis supported the move and that the Holy See would decide his future fate.
Such a sanction is very much in keeping with the church’s legal tradition of making a public reparation for a scandal done to the church, said Austen Ivereigh, director of the Catholic Voices, a British-based Catholic advocacy group.
{Cardinal Keith O’Brien (above) sits at a desk in a room in his home in Edinburgh, Scotland February 27, 2013. The senior cleric resigned under duress on Monday and Pope Benedict took the rare step of changing Vatican law to allow his successor to be elected early, adding to a sense of crisis within the Roman Catholic Church.}
{AP}
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