Europe

A report on sexual abuse in a German diocese criticizes retiring Pope Benedict XVI.

Benedict, according to the law firm that drafted the report, "vehemently rejects any misconduct."

In a long-awaited study on sexual abuse in Germany’s Munich diocese, retiring Pope Benedict XVI was chastised for his handling of four cases while archbishop in the 1970s and 1980s. Benedict, according to the law firm that drafted the report, “vehemently rejects any misconduct.”

The results were certain to rekindle criticism of Benedict’s record more than a decade after the first, and they were the sole known case involving him until Thursday.

The archdiocese commissioned the research from legal firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl about two years ago, with the goal of determining whether church officials handled claims correctly between 1945 and 2019. The law company looked through church records and interviewed witnesses.

The results were not shared with church leaders before they were made public. Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the present archbishop and a notable reformer friend of Pope Francis, was chastised in two incidents.

Former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served at Munich from 1977 to 1982 before becoming head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and then being elected pope, is one of Marx’s forerunners. Benedict provided the report with comprehensive written testimony.

“We came to the conclusion that the then-archbishop, Cardinal Ratzinger, can be accused of misconduct in a total of four cases,” said Martin Pusch, one of the report’s authors.

Two of those situations, he added, included criminals who committed crimes while he was in office and were sentenced to prison, but were maintained in pastoral work with no explicit restrictions on what they might do. Under canon law, no action was taken.

In a third example, a priest who had been convicted by a court outside of Germany was assigned to the Munich archdiocese, and the circumstances indicate that Ratzinger was aware of the priest’s prior past, according to Pusch.

When the church abuse scandal broke out in Germany in 2010, the focus was on another case: a pedophile priest whose transfer to Munich for rehabilitation was approved by Ratzinger in 1980.

The priest was allowed to resume pastoral activity, a decision taken by a lower-ranking official without contacting the archbishop, according to the Vatican. The priest was given a suspended sentence for molesting a kid in 1986.

Ulrich Wastl, another report author, claimed Benedict’s assertion that he did not attend a meeting in 1980 where the priest’s relocation to Munich was discussed lacked credibility.

“In all cases, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI categorically denies any misconduct on his part,” Pusch stated, citing “lack of knowledge of the facts and a lack of relevance under canon and penal law” as the main reasons for the retiring pontiff’s denial. However, he emphasized that the claims of ignorance were sometimes “difficult to reconcile” with the contents of church files.

A “historic” event, according to Matthias Katsch of Eckiger Tisch, a group that represents German clerical abuse survivors. He told German news agency dpa that “this building of lies that was created here in Munich to protect Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, collapsed today.”

“This is not shocking news to us,” SNAP, a group that represents survivors of clerical sex abuse, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, after years of quiet from church officials and sad memories held by victims, these nefarious actions and inactions resurface.”

Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, Benedict’s lifelong secretary, said the retired pope had not yet read the study but will in the coming days.

“The emeritus pope conveys his sadness and disgust at the abuse of minors committed by clerics, as he said many times during his papacy, and expresses his personal closeness and prayers to all the victims, some of whom he met during his apostolic tours,” Gaenswein said in a statement. Benedict left the company in 2013.

Matteo Bruni, a Vatican spokesman, said the Holy See would not respond until it had seen the report in its whole and could conduct a “careful and exhaustive study” of its contents.

Benedict’s legacy as Pope had already been tainted by the global sex abuse scandal that erupted in 2010, despite the fact that as a cardinal, he was responsible for changing the Vatican’s stance on the matter.

After his stay in Munich, Benedict took over at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1982 and received firsthand experience of the problem’s global scale. After realizing that bishops around the world weren’t punishing abusers, they were simply relocating them from parish to parish where they might rape again, Ratzinger made the then-revolutionary decision in 2001 to take responsibility for handling such cases.

The study is approximately 1,900 pages long, including annexes that include Benedict’s written comments, which have been blacked to remove names.

It lists at least 497 abuse victims and 235 probable perpetrators over the decades, though the authors claim that there were likely many more.

Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, the archbishop of Munich from 1982 to 2008 when Marx took over, was chastised for his handling of 21 instances. Pusch also stated that he is innocent of any misconduct.

Last year, in an unprecedented move, Marx volunteered to resign in protest of the Catholic Church’s “catastrophic” treatment of priest sexual abuse cases, pronouncing the church to be “at a dead end.”

Francis quickly turned down the offer, but stressed a reform process was required and that each bishop must bear responsibility for the “catastrophe” of the abuse epidemic.

In a brief appearance hours after the report was revealed, Marx made no mention of Benedict’s or his own part, although he did apologize.

“I believe that as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, I share responsibility for the church as an institution during the last few decades,” he stated. He went on to say, “As the serving archbishop, I apologize for the suffering that was brought to people” in church institutions.

As they analyze the report, church officials will assess “results and subsequent ramifications,” according to Marx, who wants to have preliminary conclusions next Thursday. He stated that dealing with abuse is inextricably linked to church reform.

Between 1946 and 2014, at least 3,677 people were molested by clergy in Germany, according to a separate church-commissioned investigation published in 2018. Nearly a third of the victims were altar boys, and more than half of the victims were 13 or younger.

The German church has been shaken by recent turmoil in the Cologne archdiocese over authorities’ handling of abuse charges.

According to a study released last year, the archbishop of Hamburg, a former Cologne church leader, failed to do his job in several occasions when dealing with such charges, but Francis turned down his offer to retire.

Although the inquiry exonerated Cologne’s archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki’s handling of the situation enraged many Catholics. After what the Vatican called “serious communication failures,” the pope ordered Woelki a several-month “spiritual vacation” in September.

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