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By Brody Levesque (Bethesda, Maryland) Mar 14 | In response to a series of critical articles by the Munich based daily media web outlet and newspaper Sueddeutsche.De, exposing years of abuses by paedolphilic priests during the Pope's tenure as Archbishop in his native Germany-the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, released Saturday a press release detailing that Pope Benedict XVI had a private meeting with Archbishop Robert Zollitsch in his private library at the Vatican, Friday, March 12, 2010.
Germany's top bishop briefed Pope Benedict XVI on the ongoing cases of clerical sex abuse in the pontiff's native Germany and said the pope encouraged him to pursue the truth and assist the victims. Zollitsch said the pope was greatly dismayed and deeply moved as he was being briefed on the scandal during Friday's meeting at the Vatican.
The principal headline in Sueddeutche's Sunday's Edition reads: "Der Vatikan in der Defensive," [ The Vatican on the defensive ] The paper's lead story reveals that;
"Rome sees in the recent revelations of abuse, a campaign against the pope, but there is growing pressure: A survey shows that the German Catholics to lose faith in the church. Reformers are now calling on the pope for the first time for a public apology."
Sueddeutche correspondent Christine Burtscheid reported that Alois Glück, President of the Central Committee of the Catholic [ German ] is quoted as saying; "The whole thing is a nightmare, a crisis of the institution, but not a crisis of faith." Glück also opposes the mandatory celibacy & is for reform.
More damaging has been the Vatican's acknowledgment that the Pope, then known as Archbishop Joesph Ratzinger, is said to have agreed to the move of a pedophile priest from Essen to Munich in 1980. Ratzinger was sitting as archbishop of Munich and Freising & Ordinariatsrat of the diocese. The spokesman for the diocese, Bernhard Kellner, spoke of "serious mistakes" that had been made in the eighties. "That particular decision was approved by the archbishop," said the diocese. Now all the files are being reexamined for so-called old cases.
The primary responsibility for the use of that priest came from the former diocesan vicar general Gerhard Gruber.
"The repeated use of the man in the parish ministry was a serious mistake," he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Friday. I accept full responsibility. I deeply regret that it could come by this decision to the offense with young people and I apologize to everyone, which was inflicted damage."
In documents released to Süddeutsche Zeitung, the affidavit of the then eleven-year-old victim stated he had been forced to perform oral sex on that priest.
In a telephone interview on Saturday, the victim, who asked to be identified as Wilfried F. to protect his anonymity, said that when the abuse was reported, the church handled the accusation as an internal matter without notifying the police or prosecutors. In the interview, he said the abuse occurred after a vacation trip to the Eifel mountains. He said the priest gave him alcohol, locked him in his bedroom, took off his clothes and molested him.
Although the matter was not reported to the police, he said church officials in Essen told him the priest had been transferred to Munich “and that he would no longer be allowed to work with children.”
The archdiocese disclosed in a statement on Friday that the priest was moved to Munich in 1980 for therapy with the approval of Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, the man who later became Pope Benedict. But the priest was soon reassigned to pastoral work by Archbishop Ratzinger’s deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, and was later convicted of sexually abusing minors.
“You see how they just kept moving him around,” Wilfried F. said. “He could keep doing it like before.”
According to SZ.de, in 1986, the priest was convicted by an Upper Bavarian district court of sexual abuse of minors and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. In addition, he had to pay a 4,000 marks penalty. Nevertheless, he was subsequently re-employed in a municipality and the priest is still in active service in Bavaria. So far there's been no comment from senior Vatican officials and the priest himself also declined to comment.
In a note broadcast over Vatican Radio on Saturday, Chief Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, acknowledged that 3,000 cases of suspected abuse of minors had come to its attention in the past decade, of which 20 percent had been brought to trial in Vatican courts. However, Rev. Federico Lombardi, said it was “evident that in recent days there are those who have tried, with a certain aggressive tenacity, in Regensburg and in Munich, to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse.” He added, “It is clear that those efforts have failed.” Lombardi sought to also defend the pope against criticism that a Vatican rule requiring secrecy in abuse cases was tantamount to obstruction of justice in civil courts.
The incident in Germany is only the latest in a series of sex abuse cases that has left the Catholic Church's leadership reeling. The growing scandal has also put Catholic leaders under siege elsewhere in Europe. Bishops in the Netherlands are looking into more than 200 suspected cases, and in Germany at least 170 former pupils at Catholic schools have made accusations.
Another case concerns an all-boys choir in Regensburg, the Domspatzen, once conducted by the pope's brother, Georg Ratzinger. [ The reported sex abuse dates from before his 30-year tenure as director.] In Austria where two newspapers reported cases of abuse among choirboys in Fügen and Vienna. Saturday, a newspaper in the predominantly German-speaking Italian province of Bolzano-Bozen recounted the story of a then 15-year-old boy who said that in the 1960s he was coerced into providing sexual services to local friars.
Ireland was the first country in Europe to confront the church's worldwide custom of shielding paedolphilic priests from the law and ensuing public scandal.
"You have to presume that the cover-up of abuse exists everywhere, to one extent or another. A new case could appear in a new country tomorrow," said David Quinn, director of a Christian think tank, the Iona Institute, that seeks to promote family values in an Ireland increasingly cool to Catholicism.
Quinn noted that stories of systemic physical, sexual and emotional abuse circulated privately in Irish society for decades, but only moved above ground in the mid-1990s when former altar boy Andrew Madden and orphanage survivor Christine Buckley went public with lawsuits and exposes of how priests and nuns tormented them with impunity.
"A lot comes down to: When does that first victim gather the courage to come forward into the spotlight?" Quinn said. "It seems to take that trigger event, the lone voice who says what so many kept silent so long. That's basically happening now in Germany. It could happen next in Spain, Poland, anywhere."
The scandals have set off an unprecedented public debate among church leaders on one of Roman Catholicism's strongest taboos – whether the paedophilia in its ranks is a consequence of priestly celibacy. On Friday, Benedict himself vigorously defended an unmarried priesthood, telling an audience of priests that it was not something to be given up for "passing cultural fashions". But one of his own prelates, Hans-Jochen Jaschke, said in a radio interview:
"The celibate lifestyle can attract people who have an abnormal sexuality and cannot integrate sexuality into their lives."
It's inevitable that all bishops of the day, including Ratzinger, handled abuse complaints against priests in-house, said the Rev. Fergus O'Donoghue, editor of the Irish Jesuit journal Studies.
"The pope was no different to any other bishop at time. The church policy was to keep it all quiet — to help people, but to avoid scandal. Avoiding scandal was a huge issue for the church," he said. "Of course there was cover-up," he added. But worse was "the systematic lack of concern for the victims."
“What is at stake, and at great risk, is Benedict’s central project for the ‘re-Christianization’ of Christendom, his desire to have Europe return to its Christian roots,” said David Gibson, the author of a biography of Benedict and a religion commentator for Politicsdaily.com. “But if the root itself is seen as rotten, then his influence will be badly compromised.”
Photo released by the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano
Pope Benedict XVI meets German Archbishop Robert Zollitsch
[Updated on: Sun, 14 March 2010 05:27] |
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