Controversy: Priest at center of Medjugorje suspended

The UK Daily Mail editorializes more than reports:

Pope finally launches crackdown on world's largest illicit Catholic shrine and suspends 'dubious' priest

The Pope has begun a crackdown on the world’s largest illicit Catholic shrine – by suspending the priest at the centre of claims that the Virgin Mary has appeared more than 40,000 times.

Benedict XVI has authorised ‘severe cautionary and disciplinary measures’ against Father Tomislav Vlasic, the former ‘spiritual director’ to six children who said Our Lady was appearing to them at Medjugorje in Bosnia.

The Franciscan priest has been suspended after he refused to cooperate into claims of scandalous sexual immorality ‘aggravated by mystical motivations’.

He has also been accused of ‘the diffusion of dubious doctrine, manipulation of consciences, suspected mysticism and disobedience towards legitimately issued orders’, and is suspected of heresy and schism.

Father Vlasic was a central figure in promoting the apparitions that allegedly began in 1981 and continue to this day.

In 1984 he boasted to Pope John Paul II that he was the one ‘who through divine providence guides the seers of Medjugorje’ and the visionaries even said that the Virgin had told them he was a living saint.

But the Bosnian cleric later took a back seat when it emerged that he had fathered a child with a nun called Sister Rufina, and that he refused to leave his order to marry her but instead begged her not to expose him.

The actual source for this report (Diocese of Mostar: "The Canonical status of Rev. Father Tomislav Vlašić, OFM") reveals that Tomislav Vlasic has indeed incurred a very grave canonical penalty from the Holy See.