NEW YORK — Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, a vigorous conservative voice in the Vatican and influential figure in the Latin American church who drew attention for seemingly playing down the church’s sexual abuse scandal, died Friday in Rome. He was 88.

His death was announced by the Vatican, which quoted Pope Francis as calling him a “well-deserving servant of the Gospel.’’

In 1999, shortly after he was proclaimed a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Castrillón was elegized in a Colombian magazine by Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and a fellow countryman, as a “rustic man with the profile of an eagle’’ and “an unpredictable cross between popular Latin American culture and Renaissance reserve.’’

Cardinal Castrillón, who spoke eight languages and had a doctorate in canon law, was controversial — particularly while he served in Rome as prefect for the Congregation for the Clergy, from 1996 to 2006, and as president of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei’’ from 2000 to 2009.

The congregation oversees the ministerial roles of parish priests. The commission supervises the observance of the pre-Vatican II Latin Rite and was created to accommodate disaffected conservative Catholics.

In Rome, Cardinal Castrillón advocated for the poor but opposed the arrogation of Christian theology to undergird leftist guerrilla movements in Latin America; sought to reconcile conservative Roman Catholics with the Holy See; and counseled empathy for priests accused of sexual abuse.

Before a worldwide reckoning with sexual abuse within the clergy erupted in Boston in 2002, Cardinal Castrillón had suggested as early as 2000 that such abuse was generally an unavoidable fact of life, and that it was being unfairly focused on by lawyers and the media.