The Sydney Morning Herald

March 17, 2010 - 3:34AM

SIMON STURDEE

Germany's Catholic Church announced an "abuse hotline" Tuesday and suspended a priest in the pope's former diocese convicted of paedophilia in 1986 who remained in the clergy, even working with minors.

As a scandal over abuse in the pope's native country snowballs, the hotline would from March 30 provide "experts ... for victims, but also for possible perpetrators," the German Bishops' Conference said in a statement.

The German Catholic Church has been thrown into crisis in recent weeks as hundreds of people have come forward alleging they were abused as minors by priests between the 1950s and 1980s.

Similar scandals have also erupted in the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland, while Ireland has been rocked by revelations about cover-up efforts by the head of the Church there in the 1970s.

And on Tuesday, a Latin American country was implicated as the Vatican said that three Brazilian clergymen had been removed, one of whom faced criminal charges. The others were suspended pending an investigation.

In the latest case in Germany, a cloister in Bad Mergentheim in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said that a priest, now 80, had been suspended on suspicion of committing abuse against minors in the 1970s.

In a further revelation, a monastery in St Ottilien, also in southern Germany, said on Monday that several monks, now dead, had admitted to abuse in the 1960s. It appealed for victims to come forward.

Accusations of abuse have now been made in around two-thirds of Germany's 27 dioceses in recent weeks including in Munich and Freising, where Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was archbishop from 1977 to 1982.

On Friday, the scandal inched closer to the pope as the diocese said that Ratzinger had approved in 1980 giving Church housing to a priest suspected of child sex abuse while he received "therapy."

The priest, named in media reports as Peter Hullermann, now 62, had been accused of abusing an 11-year-old boy while serving in the western diocese of Essen prior to his transfer to Ratzinger's diocese.

The alleged victim, Wilfried Fesselmann, now 41, told the Bild mass-circulation daily that the priest plied him with alcohol before forcing him into a sex act.

Two years later, by which time Ratzinger had been transferred to the Vatican, Hullermann was given pastoral duties in a Bavarian town and in 1986 was given a suspended jail sentence and a fine for sexually abusing children.

But he remained within the Church, serving as a priest for two decades until 2008 in the 8,500-strong community of Garching. Mayor Wolfgang Reichenwallner told Spiegel magazine he was a "wonderful preacher", portly and jovial.

The pope's former archdiocese said late Monday that Hullermann had now been suspended from his job of the past two years as "tourism pastor" after breaching conditions that he not work with minors.

He has not been accused of further cases of abuse, it stressed. Press reports said he conducted several church services for young people and went on a camping trip with minors last year.

Josef Obermaier, a senior priest charged with overseeing Hullermann, also resigned.

German priest who abused children in Pope's diocese is suspended

A German priest who was accused of molesting children when the Pope was archbishop of Munich has been suspended - three decades after the incident.

 Telegraph.co.ukPublished: 6:41PM GMT 16 Mar 2010

By Nick Squires in Rome

The diocese of Munich and Freising said he had been relieved of his duties after it emerged he had recently been on a camping trip with children.

A statement said he had been "banned from working with children and young people (but) broke this restriction". 

In 1980, Father Peter Hullermann, 62, was moved from Essen in western Germany after being accused of abusing an 11-year-old boy.Pope Benedict XVI, then known as Joseph Ratzinger, was the archbishop of Munich at the time and agreed to let the priest stay in a rectory so that he could receive "therapy".

Two years later, Hullermann was given pastoral duties in Bavaria but in 1986 was fined and given an 18-month suspended jail sentence after being convicted of molesting other children.

Despite the conviction he was allowed to move parishes to continue working. He had been working for the last 18 months in the spa town of Bad Tölz in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps.

In a meeting at the Vatican with Irish cardinals last month, the Pope described paedophilia as a "heinous crime", but he has been criticised for not speaking out against the sex abuse scandals which have emerged in his native Germany as well as Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland."

The Holy Father needs to say something about this," Dirk Taenzler, head of the Federation of German Catholic Youth, told the Berliner Zeitung daily.

The scandals had imposed "the worst strain on our Church I can think of", said Alois Glueck, a politician from Bavaria and the head of the Central Committee of German Catholics.Since the scandals first emerged in Germany in January, around 250 victims have come forward, alleging abuse at two-thirds of the country's 27 dioceses.Senior Vatican figures have claimed that the sex abuse revelations are being aggressively used to damage the Pope's standing as part of a wide-ranging vendetta against the Catholic Church.

"The rage against the pontiff is insane," said a Vatican prelate, Archbishop Rino Fisichella.At the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, a secular group accused the Vatican of failing to hold to account priests who had abused children.

The International Humanist and Ethical Union said the Vatican was a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but had contravened several of its articles and was more than 10 years behind in filing a report on compliance with its rules.

"The Vatican ... has habitually compounded the abuse and facilitated multiple reoffending by moving offenders around and shielding them from prosecuting authorities," said Keith Porteous Wood, the executive director of Britain's National Secular Society, who presented the statement.  

Vatican Moves Into Damage Control on Sex-Abuse Scandal

Time.com

Tuesday, Mar. 16, 2010

By Jeff Israely

Amid controversy, the Vatican's instinct is typically to protect the man at the top, particularly when it comes to what is known in both secular and ecclesiastical terms as scandal. That is evident again with a priest pedophile controversy from the 1980s in Germany that is threatening to draw in the German-born Benedict XVI, even as his countrymen demand that he respond directly. "The Pope was not part of what happened back then, and he shouldn't be part of it now," one Vatican insider told TIME. "He should offer the greatest silence possible, not because he doesn't care about the abuse, but because it would involve him in scandal and undermine his Magisterium" — that is, his papal teaching authority. Indeed, the officials at the Vatican have characterized the German revelations as a targeted campaign to discredit the Church as a whole.

For a previous episode of the Church's attempts at damage control, it is instructive to look back to April 2002, when a similar clergy sex abuse storm was ravaging the U.S. Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II summoned all the American Cardinals to Rome for an urgent meeting on the crisis. It was an unprecedented public acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation from the typically insulated Vatican leadership. But reporters who'd made the trip from Boston, the epicenter of the scandal, were hardly impressed with Vatican openness. When the post-summit briefing included five senior Church officials, but not the embattled leader of the Boston Archdiocese, a Massachusetts TV reporter barked out a question demanding the whereabouts of Cardinal Bernard Law: "When is the Cardinal going to resign?" The Cardinal would step down months later. But he has never given a full accounting of his role.

(See TIME's 2002 cover story on the Boston sex abuse scandal.)

In some sense, the dynamic from eight years ago is still in play. Back then, both the American hierarchy and the Roman Curia struggled to respond to a spiraling series of revelations, while resisting calls for heads to roll among those Church leaders judged responsible for their poor handling of abusive priests. But what makes the current situation particularly delicate is that the head that some critics want served up is none other than the Pope himself. One senior Vatican official, who worked directly with the Pope while he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the past, says the Pontiff's daily routine continues as always. "The spectacle in the newspapers makes me angry, but does not discourage me. We continue our work with serenity. But it does pain us to know that the Holy Father is suffering."

But as the Pope suffers in silence, Catholics in his native Germany are growing increasingly angry as revelations pile up. They were first set off by accusations from former students at a prestigious Jesuit High School in Berlin. But much of the attention has now shifted to the case of Peter Hullermann, a priest who sexually abused minors in the late 1970s, and was transferred to Munich in 1980, initially for treatment, but who was later allowed to return to his full pastoral duties. The man at the helm of the Munich Archdiocese at the time of Hullermann's arrival there was Cardinal Joseph Razinger, who moved on to Rome in 1982 to become a senior Vatican official, before eventually rising to the papacy in 2005 with the name Benedict XVI.

(See how a pedophile priest scandal is scandalizing the Catholic Church in Germany)

Church officials in Munich have now confirmed that in 1986 Hullerman was convicted of sexually abusing children in the Bavarian town of Grafing — and was then allowed to again work among children, though no further accusations of abuse have come out since. Vatican officials have denied that the future Pope knew anything about Hullerman's being allowed to work with children again, and his deputy at the time quickly took full responsibility last week for the transfer. On Monday, Hullerman was suspended from his current position, and his supervisor, Prelate Josef Obermaier, resigned. For some Catholic faithful in Germany, however, the case must be addressed directly by the Pope. "The Holy Father needs to say something about this," Dirk Taenzler, head of the Federation of German Catholic Youth (BDKJ), told the daily Berliner Zeitung. The Vatican is expected to release a letter soon on similar abuse cases that hit Ireland in the last decade. However, it is not clear whether the document will mention either Germany in general or the Munich case in particular.

It is hard to predict what the the Pope will do — or what will happen next. Cardinal Law's fate may offer insights but no real parallels even though Cardinal Ratzinger held the same position in Munich as Law held in Boston. Law was a very high Prince of the Church when the Boston scandal broke, but Ratzinger is now the Supreme Pontiff. No one should expect a papal resignation — indeed, both a Vatican Cardinal and as pontiff, Benedict has been more responsive than many of his colleagues on clergy sex abuse. Still, the Church's history of silence is galling to the faithful. Law's reticence to speak up and take full responsibility only deepened the pain of the victims and anger of the faithful. And those seeking justice in Law's story will find little to satisfy them. After he finally stepped down in shame from his Boston post, he would lose much of his old influence. But Cardinal Law wound up with the highly prestigious role of Archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, one of the oldest and most beautiful properties of the Holy See.

Irish police aware of Cardinal Brady's involvement in sex abuse case for years

IrishCentral.com

Published Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 8:52 AM

Updated Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 11:46 AM

By DONAL THORNTON, IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Irish police have known about the role played by Cardinal Brady in the 1975 investigation into Fr. Brendan Smyth for years, it has been revealed.

Fr. Brendan Smyth was the notorious pedophile that abused scores of children as a priest in Ireland.

However, police detectives never deemed it necessary to charge Brady and some of his colleagues with attempting to cover up the child abuse.

Cardinal Brady's colleagues were unaware of his involvement in the Smyth case up until last weekend.

The bishops were also unaware of a court case taken against the Cardinal by a woman that was abused by Smyth.

In 1975 Brady was asked to lead an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse against Smyth.

The women in question was interviewed by Brady and asked to take an oath of silence. Brady never passed on any information to the police and Smyth was consequently banned from taking confessions.

The woman who wishes to be only know as "Samantha" told the Irish Times that two other schoolgirls that were abused by Smyth at the same time had committed suicide.

 “I was raped, abused and had pictures taken of my body. I was 13 when it began in 1974 and it went on for five years. If he [Cardinal Brady] had done something my life would have been so different," said the woman.

Yesterday Brady said he would resign from his position if asked to do so by the pope. Brady told the BBC that he did all he could by 1975 standards.

 “I really played my part, the part I had 35 years ago as priest- recording secretary, to the best of my ability.

"We are now judging the behavior of 35 years ago by the standards we set today and I don’t think that’s fair, it does not apply to other sectors of society,” said Brady.

"There should be a Garda (police) investigation to determine whether or not the failure to report Fr Smyth’s crimes to the civil authorities was, itself, a criminal offense,” said Labour party spokesperson on Social and Family Affairs Roisin Shortall.

“I am advised that the administering of an oath requiring these children not to disclose the abuse to anyone else may also have constituted an offense.”

Victim support groups have called on the Cardinal to resign from office.

“One does not need to be a learned theologian or an ordained priest to appreciate how grievously wrong it is to silence young children in order to protect a sex offender," said One in Four director Maeve Lewis.

Lewis accused the Cardinal of "reckless endangerment" and called on him to resign.

Ireland has a total of 23 bishops, and 22 of them have refused to comment on the issue.

Bishop of Clogher Joseph Duffy gave Brady his full support and said he should not resign from office.

Cardinal Brady did not tell the Pope of his involvement in the Smyth case.