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Cardinal O'Brien, the head of the church in Scotland, is the highest-ranking figure in the church's recent history to make such an admission.

"I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal," Cardinal O'Brien, 74, said in a statement issued by church officials in Scotland.

The statement stunned many in the Scottish church and beyond. Some said his acknowledgment may mean it is possible that the cardinal, who faces an internal investigation by the Vatican, was admitting that the undefined sexual activities he acknowledged may not be restricted to the known allegations, the earliest of which relates to 1980. Ordained in 1965, he became an archbishop in 1985, but was not named cardinal until 2003.

Last weekend, The Observer newspaper reported the accusations of impropriety with accounts from the four men. The first was a seminarian when Cardinal O'Brien, then a priest, served as a powerful supervisory figure in two Scottish seminaries that prepared teenagers and young men for the priesthood. The other three were young priests; it is not clear exactly when in the 1980s they say they were subject to his unwanted advances.

Initially, Cardinal O'Brien contested the allegations and said he was seeking legal advice. But on Sunday, he offered a sweeping apology that was, however, bereft of detail. "To those I have offended, I apologize and ask forgiveness," he said. "To the Catholic Church and the people of Scotland, I also apologize. I will now spend the rest of my life in retirement. I will play no further part in the public life of the Catholic Church in Scotland."

Many analysts saw the cardinal's resignation and absence from the conclave as a result of papal pressure, and British newspapers have cited unidentified Vatican officials as saying Pope Benedict — who stunned the world with his own announcement on Feb. 11 that he would step down — had ordered the cardinal to remove himself.

Benedict's own resignation, which he attributed to ill health and exhaustion, took effect on Thursday, bringing an end to an eight-year papacy overshadowed by scandals involving cover-ups of pedophilia and other forms of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics.

The Vatican and more than a billion Catholics worldwide now await the papal conclave this month, in which 115 cardinals will choose one among their number as Benedict's successor. He will inherit a crisis over church governance that Vatican experts have described as one of the legacies of the 85-year-old Benedict, a widely respected theologian with a devoted following whose critics faulted him with failing to deal conclusively with the sexual abuse scandals in the church.

Analysts said that Cardinal O'Brien's apology was bound to place a shadow over the process. Even before his announcement on Sunday, it was already seen as a rare development that Cardinal O'Brien would not attend the conclave, and several other cardinals accused of protecting abusive priests are under pressure not to participate from advocates for abuse victims. Among them are Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles; Angelo Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals; and Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of the church in Ireland.

The differing approaches across the Catholic world to handling the sex abuse crisis are expected to be evident at the conclave. Bishops' conferences in English-speaking countries have tended to adopt a more aggressive, zero-tolerance policy in recent years, while more traditionalist cardinals inside the Vatican and elsewhere in the Catholic world have often closed ranks to defend fellow prelates.

Cardinal O'Brien was a powerful voice of the conservative orthodoxy on homosexuality that characterized the papacies of John Paul II, who elevated him, and Benedict. Abandoning the relatively tolerant approach to the issue he had adopted in the years before he donned a cardinal's red hat, he condemned homosexuality as immoral, and as a "grotesque subversion" — a stand that won him a "Bigot of the Year" award last year by a British gay rights group, Stonewall.

His sudden downfall is a major crisis for the church in Scotland, where most of the country's 750,000 Catholics are of Irish ancestry and live in the central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As migrants or their descendants, they suffered decades of discrimination.

"It's possibly, in terms of the internal history of the Church, the biggest crisis in the history of Scottish Catholicism since the Reformation," said Tom Devine, a professor at Edinburgh University and a prominent historian. "The Catholic Church has always been subject to, for the last several hundred years in Scotland, a range of tribulations. But this is different because this crisis has come from the heart and soul of the Church."

The archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, was appointed on Wednesday to take over Cardinal O'Brien's responsibilities, but what role he will have in any inquiry into the accusations remains unknown.

On homosexuality, Archbishop Tartaglia appears to be at least as uncompromising as the cardinal. Last year, he created an uproar by linking the death at 44 of a former priest and member of Parliament, David Cairns, to homosexuality.