Vatican denounces attempts to draw Pope into scandal 

Those who 'aggressively' tried to connect the Pontiff with sex abuse cases have failed, spokesman insists 

The Independent online

By Andrew McCorkell

Sunday, 14 March 2010

The Vatican yesterday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to draw Pope Benedict XVI into a scandal in his German homeland, after it emerged a suspected paedophile priest was sent to do community work by the Munich archdiocese while the Pope was archbishop there some 30 years ago.

Both the Holy See's spokesman and its prosecutor for sexual abuse of minors by clergy defended the Pope. Abuse scandals have dogged the Pontiff in recent days following decades of abuses in the UK, the United States and around the world. The spokesman said the Pope has bravely confronted such cases for years.

On Friday the Munich archdiocese acknowledged it had transferred a paedophile priest at that time, amid abuse accusations connected to the Regensburg boys' choir, which was directed by the Pope's elder brother for 30 years.

Pope Benedict XVI drew further criticism over a 2001 church directive he wrote while a Vatican cardinal, instructing bishops to keep abuse cases confidential.

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said on Vatican Radio: "It's rather clear that in the last days there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses.

"For any objective observer, it's clear that these efforts have failed." He said the Munich archdiocese insisted the Pope was not involved in the decision to transfer the suspected child abuser.

The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising announced on Friday night that it was setting up a new taskforce to focus on raising awareness in preventing sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and its institutions. Prelate Peter Beer, general vicar of the archdiocese, said: "There is no 100 per cent protection against sexual abuse, because we can never rule out the failure or misdoing of individuals, but we want to apply ourselves 100 per cent to prevent it from happening again."

The taskforce will collaborate with the working group charged with looking into allegations of past abuse.

Last month, the archdiocese, where the Pope served as archbishop from 1977-82, set up the working group after allegations of abuse in a church-run school surfaced. One man, Thomas Mayer, told Germany's Der Spiegel weekly that he had been sexually and physically abused while in the Regensburger Domspatzen boys' choir in 1992.

Mr Mayer's allegations are the first to overlap with the time the Pontiff's brother, Georg Ratzinger, led the group – from 1964-94. Cases of sexual abuse that have previously been reported date back to the late 1950s.

Mr Mayer is reported to have said he was raped by older pupils, adding that students were forced to have anal sex with one another in the apartment of a prefect at the church-run boarding school attached to the choir.

The Regensburg diocese has refused to comment on the report.

Associated Press

14 March 2010

By SHAWN POGATCHNIK (AP)

DUBLIN — It often starts as a voice in the wilderness, but can swell into an entire nation's demand for truth. From Ireland to Germany, Europe's many victims of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church are finally breaking social taboos and confronting the clergy to face its demons.

Ireland was the first in Europe to confront the church's worldwide custom of shielding pedophile priests from the law and public scandal. Now that legacy of suppressed childhood horror is being confronted in other parts of the Continent — nowhere more poignantly than in Germany, the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI.

The recent spread of claims into the Netherlands, Austria and Italy has analysts and churchmen wondering how deep the scandal runs, which nation will be affected next, and whether a tide of lawsuits will force European dioceses to declare bankruptcy like their American cousins.

"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 aboveground 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.

Floodgates opened for Irish complaints that have topped 15,000 in this country of 4 million. Three government-ordered investigations have shocked and disgusted the nation, which has footed most of the bill to settle legal claims topping euro1 billion (nearly $1.5 billion).

"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."

In January, an elite Jesuit school in Berlin declared it was aware of seven child-abuse cases in its past and appointed an outside investigator, Ursula Raue, to seek testimony. Within weeks, she had gathered stories of long-suppressed woe from more than 100 ex-students abused by their Jesuit masters, and from 60 molested by parish priests.

"I always thought that at some point the wave would reach us," said Petra Dorsch-Jungsberger, a commentator on Catholic affairs and retired University of Munich communications professor.

She credited heavy German media coverage of the latest Irish abuse scandal — a November report into decades of cover-up in the Dublin Archdiocese involving approximately 170 priests — with inspiring similar soul-searching in Germany.

"Once the door had been opened, then many others felt they were able to step up and say: That happened to us too," she said.

In recent weeks, new German abuse claims have surfaced on a near-daily basis and spread to Pope Benedict's Bavarian heartland and the Regensberg boys' choir long directed by the pope's brother. Benedict was Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger of Munich from 1977 to 1982, and questions now focus on what role, if any, the pontiff, played in handing pedophile priests to new parishes rather than to the law.

A Swiss abbot said in an interview published Saturday that 60 people have reported being victims of abuse by Catholic priests in Switzerland.

Abbot Martin Werlen of the Benedictine Abbey of Einsiedeln told Swiss daily Aargauer Zeitung that the allegations were reported to the Swiss Bishops Conference, which is investigating them.

The Vatican on Saturday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the spreading scandals of pedophile priests in his German homeland, and contended he has long confronted abuse cases with courage.

In separate interviews, both the Holy See's spokesman and its prosecutor for sex abuse of minors by clergy sought to defend the pope.

"It's rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses," Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio.

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."

In the Netherlands, a former Catholic boarding-school abuse victim is leading a campaign for accountability. Bert Smeets, 58, has formed Mea Culpa, a victims group that has collected testimony from hundreds of abuse victims and is mulling a class-action lawsuit against the Dutch church.

The church has apologized to the victims and set up an inquiry headed by a former government minister, a Protestant. Smeets dismisses that effort as "a typical Vatican cover-up." He said the pressure on the church came from aggressive investigations into abuse in Ireland and the U.S.

In other predominantly Catholic areas of Europe, child-abuse scandals have tarnished individual priests and even a Polish archbishop, but have not mushroomed into a mass movement. In Spain, more than a dozen priests have been convicted of child abuse in recent decades and two potentially larger-scale cases are attracting attention.

Ireland was until relatively recently the most enthusiastically Catholic country in Europe. Its half-dozen seminaries exported priests worldwide. All but one of those seminaries is closed now, illustrating the rapid falloff in Mass attendance as the economy has advanced and secularism has spread.

Quinn, the Dublin think-tank director, noted that a few Irish dioceses are openly warning that they're struggling to pay bills stemming from abuse claims. In the southeast diocese of Kells, the archbishop's house has had to be remortgaged.

"The church is asset-rich but cash-poor," Quinn said, noting that it's the biggest property owner in Ireland but has comparatively little cash in the bank. He said the Vatican, too, has less money on tap than resides in the endowment fund of a typical top-tier U.S. university.

RNW (Radio Netherlands Worldwide)

14 March 2010

Benedict XVI with a sexual abuse scandal that has erupted in Germany, his country of birth.

A Vatican representative referred to "aggressive" attempts to accuse the pontiff of turning a blind eye to the abuse, which emerged on Friday. In the 1980s, when Pope Benedict was the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, he is said to have approved housing for a priest who had molested a young boy in another archdiocese.

Although the priest reputedly underwent therapy in Munich, he quickly returned to work and abused more children. Six years later, he was given a suspended prison sentence for child sex offences.

BBC News

13 March 2010 

Pope Benedict has had to deal with sex abuse scandals in various countries The Vatican has denounced attempts to link Pope Benedict XVI to a child abuse scandal in his native Germany. 

Spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said there had been "aggressive" efforts to involve the Pope, but added: "It's clear that these attempts have failed."

The Holy See's prosecutor meanwhile said that "to accuse the current Pope of hiding [cases of abuse] is false".

The Pope's former diocese earlier said he once unwittingly approved housing for a priest accused of child abuse.

The episode dates back to 1980 when he was archbishop of Munich and Freising, and known as Joseph Ratzinger.

However, a former deputy said he - not the future Pope - had made the decision to re-house the priest, who later abused other children and was convicted.

'Defamation'

Father Lombardi told Vatican Radio accusations of a Papal cover-up were "defamatory".

"There have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses," he said.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican official in charge of prosecuting priests alleged to have committed serious sexual crimes, told L'Avvenire - the Italian Bishops Conference newspaper - that accusations that the pontiff had helped cover up abuse were "false and calumnious".

He added that the future Pope "showed wisdom and firmness" in handling cases of abuse when he was head of the department in charge of Church discipline, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, for four years before becoming Pope.

But Monsignor Scicluna admitted that since 2001, about 3,000 accusations of abuse by priests of minors had been received by Vatican officials. They involved both diocesan and religious priests and regarded acts committed over the last 50 years.

"We can say that about 60% of the cases chiefly involved sexual attraction towards adolescents of the same sex, another 30% involved heterosexual relations," he said.

"The remaining 10% were cases of paedophilia in the true sense of the term; that is, based on sexual attraction towards prepubescent children."

He said that 60% of the cases had not come to trial, largely because of the advanced age of the accused, but that they faced other "administrative and disciplinary provisions", including being required to live in seclusion and prohibition from celebrating Mass.

"It's true that there has been no formal condemnation," Monsignor Scicluna said, adding: "It must be made absolutely clear that in these cases, some of which are particularly sensational and have caught the attention of the media, no absolution has taken place."

He also addressed accusations that the Vatican was obstructing justice by hiding reports of abuse, saying that "secrecy during the investigative phase served to protect the good name of all the people involved; first and foremost, the victims themselves, then the accused priests who have the right — as everyone does — to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty".

But he said Church secrecy had "never been understood as a ban on denouncing the crimes to the civil authorities".

'Therapy'

Following a report in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, the diocese of Munich and Freising confirmed earlier this week that then-Archbishop Ratzinger had let the priest, known only as H, stay at a vicarage in Munich for "therapy".

H had been suspected of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform a sex act upon him in the northern city of Essen.

While he was in Munich, between February 1980 and August 1982, no wrongdoing was reported.

He was then transferred to the town of Grafing, where he was relieved of his duties in 1985 after allegations of child sex abuse, the diocese said.

In 1986, he was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence and a fine for sexually abusing minors, details of which were not given by the diocese.

Archbishop Ratzinger's former deputy, Gerhard Gruber, has taken responsibility for initially allowing H to remain within the Church, saying this had been "a bad mistake".

Speaking to the Associated Press, he added that there had been about 1,000 priests in the diocese at the time and that the archbishop "could not deal with everything".

The Times Online

From The Times March 13, 2010

Richard Owen, Rome

The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal last night as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The cleric went on to reoffend and was convicted of child abuse but continues to work as a priest in Upper Bavaria.

The priest was sent from Essen to Munich for therapy in 1980 when he was accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The archdiocese confirmed that the Pope, who was then a cardinal, had approved a decision to accommodate the priest in a rectory while the therapy took place.

The priest, identified only as H, was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing minors after he was moved to pastoral work in nearby Grafing. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence and fined DM 4,000 (£1,800 today). There have been no formal charges against him since.

The church has been accused of a cover-up after at least 170 allegations of child abuse by German Catholic priests. The scandal broke in January but the claims, which continue to emerge, span three decades. Critics say that priests were redeployed to other parishes rather than dismissed when they were found to be abusing children.

The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising said that there had been no complaints against the priest during the therapy at a church community in Munich. It said that the decision to let him continue working in Grafing was taken by Gerhard Gruber, now 81, who was vicar general of the archdiocese.

The Vatican said that Mgr Gruber had taken “full responsibility” for the priest’s move back into pastoral work but did not comment further.

Mgr Gruber said that the Pope, who was made a cardinal in 1977, had not been not aware of his decision because there were 1,000 priests in the diocese at the time and he had left many decisions to lower-level officials. “The cardinal could not deal with everything,” he said. “The repeated employment of H in pastoral duties was a serious mistake ... I deeply regret that this decision led to offences against youths. I apologise to all those who were harmed.” He did not indicate whether the convicted paedophile would be allowed to continue working in the church.

An American group, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said it “boggles the mind to hear a German Catholic official claim that a credibly accused paedophile priest was reassigned to parish work without the knowledge of his boss, then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger”. Any expulsion of a priest from the Church, however, must go through the Vatican.

The Pope was Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977 to 1982 and then moved to Rome as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a post that he held until his election as pontiff five years ago after the death of John Paul II.

Priest H worked in an old people’s home for two years after his conviction. He then moved to the town of Garching, where he became a curate and later a church administrator. In May 2008 he was removed from his duties in Garching and was not allowed to work with young people. He still works in the diocese, according to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which broke the story.

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the head of Germany’s Catholic bishops, apologised yesterday to the victims of clerical sex abuse after meeting Pope Benedict. He said that the German-born Pope had expressed “great dismay” over the scandals and had encouraged him to take “decisive and courageous steps” to tackle the problem.

Mgr Zollitsch, Archbishop of Freiburg, said that the German Church would investigate abuse allegations and take measures to prevent a recurrence. He said that the Pope had been “deeply moved” by his report of sex abuse cases in Germany, and had praised the naming of a bishop to act as a clerical sex-abuse watchdog. He added that paedophilia was not confined to the Roman Catholic Church.

Mgr Gerhard Müller, the Bishop of Regensburg, said there was “not even a minimal link” between paedophilia and priestly celibacy, which would “not be modified”.

12:00 AM CST on Saturday, March 13, 2010

FROM WIRE REPORTS The Associated Press, The New York Times

VATICAN CITY – A widening child sex abuse scandal in Germany has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI. His former archdiocese said Friday that while Benedict was archbishop, a suspected pedophile priest was transferred to a job where he later abused children.

The pontiff is also under fire for a 2001 Vatican document he wrote instructing bishops to keep such cases secret.

The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict's handling of abuse claims both when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982 and then the prefect of the Vatican office that deals with such crimes, a position he held until his 2005 election as pope.

Benedict was briefed Friday on the scope of the scandal in his native Germany by the head of the German Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch. He reported that the pontiff had expressed "great dismay and deep shock" over the scandal but encouraged bishops to continue searching for the truth.

Hours later, the Munich Archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted.

Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, headed the archdiocese at the time and approved the priest's transfer for therapy, the archdiocese said in a written statement. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement Friday noting that the Munich vicar-general had taken "full responsibility" for the decision, seeking to remove any question about the pontiff's potential responsibility as archbishop at the time.

Victims advocates weren't persuaded.

"We find it extraordinarily hard to believe that Ratzinger didn't reassign the predator or know about the reassignment," said Barbara Blaine, president and founder of SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

The pope, meanwhile, continues to be under fire for the Vatican letter he sent to all bishops nine years ago advising them that cases of sexual abuse of minors must be forwarded to his then-office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the cases were to be subject to pontifical secret.

German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has cited the document as evidence that the Vatican created a "wall of silence" around abuse cases that prevented prosecution.

Irish bishops have said the document had been "widely misunderstood" by the bishops to mean they shouldn't go to police.

A government-authorized investigation into Ireland's sex abuse scandal harshly criticized the Vatican for its insistence on secrecy in the 2001 directive, saying that it "could undoubtedly constitute an inhibition on reporting child sexual abuse to the civil authorities or others."

And lawyers for abuse victims in the United States have cited the document in arguing that the Catholic Church tried to obstruct justice.

But canon lawyers said Friday that there was nothing in the document that would preclude bishops from fulfilling their moral and civic duties of going to police when confronted with a case of child abuse.

They stressed that the document merely concerned procedures for handling the church trial of an accused priest and that the secrecy required by Rome for that hearing by no means extended to a ban on reporting such crimes to civil authorities.

"Canon law concerning grave crimes ... doesn't in any way interfere with or diminish the obligations of the faithful to civil laws," said Monsignor Davide Cito, a professor of canon law at Rome's Santa Croce University.

Experts said the scandals could undermine Benedict's moral authority.

"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."

The Associated Press, The New York Times