An apology on sex abuse from Germany’s bishops
BERLIN — The head of the German Bishops’ Conference apologized on Tuesday for the “pain and suffering” caused by the Catholic Church’s decades-long failure to take abuse of children at the hands of clergy members seriously enough, and pledged to pursue justice.
The apology came on the heels of a new report that found more than 3,600 children in German had been victimized by clergy members.
“This is not about saving an institution,” the conference leader, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, said at a news conference where the findings of the study were presented. “Sexual abuse is a crime and those who commit it must be punished.”
Hours earlier, Pope Francis acknowledged that anger over the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic clergy members was driving many people, especially the young, away from an institution they feel no longer speaks to, understands or can protect them.
“They are outraged by sexual and economic scandals that do not meet with clear condemnation, by our unpreparedness to really appreciate the lives and sensibilities of the young, and simply by the passive role we assign them,” Francis told Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox youths in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, where he was wrapping up a four-day pilgrimage to the Baltics, The Associated Press reported.
Like Cardinal Marx, the pope said the church wanted to respond to complaints transparently and honestly. But years after the first reports of abuse emerged in the United States and Australia in the early 2000s, and a decade after the church in Germany began grappling with accounts of widespread abuse, many victims still feel frustrated, alienated and ignored.
Germany is a largely secular country, and less than a third of its 82 million inhabitants belong to the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the church remains a powerful institution, embedded in the country’s culture and social structures. It also employs more than a million people in the hospitals, day care centers and nursing homes that it runs.
Since 2010, the Bishops’ Conference has run a hotline for abuse and had a bishop serving as its own commissioner on the issue.
But the study, which was leaked to several media organizations last week, found that at least 1,670 clergy members and deacons had abused 3,677 children — more than half of them boys — from 1946 to 2014. That abuse continued even after the church took initial steps to try to prevent it.
The researchers tried to identify a broader explanation for how the church became an environment in which sexual abuse could flourish.
Celibacy itself, they said, may not a factor for sexual abuse, but a commitment to such a life “requires an extensive examination of one’s own emotions, eroticism and sexuality.”