VATICAN CITY — A conservative Catholic movement has acknowledged unspecified “inappropriate” actions by its founder, but refused to address recent reports that he fathered at least one illegitimate child.

The reports, which have circulated around Rome and online for the last several days, concern the late Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ and its affiliated lay movement, Regnum Christi.

In 2006, two years before his death, Maciel was disciplined by Pope Benedict XVI amid charges that he had sexually abused teenaged boys.

“We have discovered facts about Father Maciel that surprise us and are difficult to understand,” said the Rev. Paolo Scarafoni, a spokesman at the movement’s headquarters in Rome, on Wednesday (Feb. 4). “We have received a great gift from our founder but we have also discovered that he had faults.”

Scarafoni declined to discuss the revelations in any detail, citing concern for the “privacy” of persons involved, and the difficulty of verifying decades-old accusations.

He said the Legion had no plans to apologize to any alleged abuse victims or offer them pastoral care. “They have surely found a way by now to receive adequate care,” he said.

The Legion of Christ (or Legionaries of Christ), which enjoyed Vatican favor under Pope John Paul II, claims more than 700 priests and 2,500 seminarians in 40 countries, including at least 75 priests in the United States. Regnum Christi reportedly has some 60,000 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 Legion 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.”

On Wednesday, Scarafoni denied that the Legion’s new acknowledgment of its founder’s faults had undermined morale.

“There is great peace among us,” he said. “This is a period of trial, but we are forcing ourselves to carry on and overcome it and not abandon our mission.”

Yet according to one longtime observer, Maciel’s troubled history has already provoked a crisis within the movement.

“These people are in a spiritual free-fall,” said Jason Berry, one of the duo of journalists who first reported the accusations against Maciel in 1997, and the co-author of a 2004 book on the case, “Vows of Silence.”

“Imagine being told for all these years that the founder is a saint falsely accused by the Vatican,” he said. “Imagine the sense of betrayal they must feel.”

Berry predicted that the Legion’s most recent statement would not be the last word on the Maciel case.

“You’ve got a lot of outraged people out there, and they’re going to start talking,” he said. “It would be hard for (the Legionaries) not to have a loss of support because of this.”