A former top Vatican cardinal who planned to lead a Latin Mass in honor of Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday at the Basilica in Washington has been disinvited by the conservative Catholic group organizing the event because of fresh controversy over the cardinal’s role in the sexual abuse scandal.

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, a Colombian who formerly headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, came under fire last week when a Web site posted a letter he wrote in 2001 praising a French bishop for refusing to hand over to the police a priest who had raped children.

“I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration,” Cardinal Castrillón wrote to Bishop Pierre Pican, who was convicted in France for failing to report sex crimes against children. “You have acted well, and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest.”

The cardinal compounded the controversy last week when he said at a conference in Spain that Pope John Paul II had authorized the letter and told him to send it to bishops around the world.