Report on sex abuse faults retired pope
Benedict XVI criticized for handling of 4 cases when he was Munich archbishop
BERLIN — A long-awaited report on sexual abuse in Germany’s Munich diocese on Thursday faulted retired Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of four cases when he was archbishop in the 1970s and 1980s. The law firm that drew up the report said Benedict strongly denies any wrongdoing.
The findings were seen as like to reignite criticism of Benedict’s record more than a decade after the first, and until Thursday only, known case involving him was made public.
The archdiocese commissioned the report from law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl nearly two years ago, with a mandate to look into abuse between 1945 and 2019 and whether church officials handled allegations correctly. The law firm examined church files and spoke to witnesses.
Church officials weren’t informed of the results ahead of publication. The current archbishop — Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a prominent reformist ally of Pope Francis — was faulted in two cases.
The report runs to nearly 1,900 pages, including annexes among which are Benedict’s written responses, redacted to black out names.
It points to at least 497 abuse victims over the decades and at least 235 suspected perpetrators, though the authors said there were probably many more.
Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, Munich’s archbishop from 1982 until Marx took over in 2008, was faulted over his handling of 21 cases. Martin Pusch, one of the report’s authors, said he also (AP/dpa/Sven Hoppe) denies wrongdoing.
Marx’s predecessors include the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served in Munich from 1977-82 before becoming head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later being elected pope. Benedict gave extensive written testimony for the report.
“In a total of four cases, we came to the conclusion that the then-archbishop, Cardinal Ratzinger, can be accused of misconduct,” Pusch said.
Two of those cases, he said, involved perpetrators who offended while he was in office and were punished by the judicial system but were kept in pastoral work without express limits on what they were allowed to do. No action was ordered under canon law.
In a third case, a cleric who had been convicted by a court outside Germany was put into service in the Munich archdiocese and the circumstances speak for Ratzinger having known of the priest’s previous history, Pusch said.
When the church abuse scandal first flared in Germany in 2010, attention swirled around another case of a priest accused of pedophilia whose transfer to Munich to undergo therapy was approved under Ratzinger in 1980.
The priest was allowed to resume pastoral work, a decision that the church has said was made by a lower-ranking official without consulting the archbishop. In 1986, the priest received a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.
Another of the report’s authors, Ulrich Wastl, said Benedict’s claim not to have attended a meeting in 1980 in which the priest’s transfer to Munich was discussed lacks credibility.
“In all cases, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI strictly denies any wrongdoing on his part,” Pusch said, and the retired pontiff cites largely “lack of knowledge of the facts and a lack of relevance under canon and criminal law.” But he added that the assertions of lack of knowledge were sometimes “hard to reconcile” with the contents of church files.
Matthias Katsch of Eckiger Tisch, a group representing German clergy abuse survivors, spoke of a “historic” moment.
“This building of lies that was constructed here in Munich to protect Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, collapsed today,” he told German news agency dpa.
Benedict’s longtime secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, said the retired pope hadn’t yet read the report but would in the coming days.
“The emeritus pope, as he repeated many times during the years of his pontificate, expresses his upset and shame at the abuse of minors committed by clerics, and expresses his personal closeness and his prayers to all the victims, some of whom he met during his apostolic journeys,” Gaenswein said in a statement. Benedict retired in 2013.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the Holy See wouldn’t comment until it had read the report in full and could give the contents “careful and detailed examination.”
Benedict’s legacy as pope had already been colored by the global flare-up in 2010 of the sex abuse scandal, although as a cardinal he was responsible for turning around the Vatican’s approach to the issue.
Benedict gained firsthand knowledge of the global scope of the problem when he took over at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1982, after his time in Munich. Ratzinger in 2001 assumed responsibility for processing those cases after he realized bishops around the world weren’t punishing abusers but were just moving them from parish to parish.