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March 19, 2010 - 7:32 AM | by: Greg Burke

The sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Europe has moved one step closer to Pope Benedict just as he prepares to send a letter on the abuse question to the Irish faithful.

Benedict was the Archbishop of Munich in the early 1980s, and a psychiatrist says he warned the archdiocese about a priest he was treating at the time.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, told the New York Times that he told archdiocesan officials in Munich that the priest, Fr. Peter Hullerman, “desperately has to be kept away from working with children.”

Huth said he did not have direct contact with Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, about the case, nor did he know if Raztinger knew about his warnings. Hullerman had been brought to the archdiocese of Munich in 1980 for therapy with Ratzinger’s approval.

Ratzinger, who was named Archbishop of Munich in 1977, moved to Rome in early 1982 as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The psychiatrist’s warnings clearly were not heeded, and one of Ratzinger’s assistants in Munich, Fr. Gerhard Gruber, has taken the blame for putting Hullerman back to work as a priest so quickly after he went into therapy.

In 1986, Hullerman was convicted of sexual abuse of boys, but was not ordered by the church to stay away from children until 12 years later. While the German bishops have accepted their blame for hundreds of cases of abuse now coming to light, something was also deeply askew in civil society. A German court failed to give Father Hullerman a stiff jail sentence after his conviction, letting him off with five-years probation and a fine.

Yahoo News

Associated Press

19 March 2010

VERENA SCHMITT-ROSCHMANN, Associated Press Writer

MUNICH – Pope Benedict XVI's former diocese is facing new allegations of physical and sexual abuse on a daily basis, the head of its new sex-abuse task force said Friday.

"It is like a tsunami," Elke Huemmeler, who leads the diocese's newly founded abuse prevention task force, told The Associated Press.

Huemmeler estimates there are about 120 cases on the record to date, around 100 of them at the nearby Ettal monastery boarding school, run by Benedictine monks. She stresses, however, her role is not to deal with the old cases, but help set up the prevention program.

On Friday, her new Task Force on Sexual Abuse Prevention, now officially commissioned and backed by Archbishop Reinhard Marx, began its work.

By November, it plans to put forth a comprehensive plan to fight abuse in Roman Catholic church institutions. It is the first of its kind in the German church, which has been shaken to its foundation by new allegations of sexual and physical attacks on minors since the beginning of the year.

When the first abuse cases broke at Ettal about three weeks ago, Huemmeler immediately sat down with four or five colleagues to brainstorm and find a way out of the "disaster", as she calls it.

"I don't think I have ever seen us that shocked," Huemmeler, head of the diocese's social work unit, said about the church leadership.

Marx has said he wants to bring out everything into the open and also named a commission to comb through old records to find out who knew what and when.

The diocese now has three specialists to listen to and investigate victims' allegations of abuse, Huemmeler says. The third was named just this week because the workload has grown immensely in such a short time.

The first step is to take stock of what has happened, to analyze patterns and then find ways to prevent sexual abuse by making people look more closely.

When educators start doing unusual things like taking kids for walks or having them over for dinner "a red light has to start blinking," she says.

Huemmeler says several institutions have been affected by the abuse allegations but did not name them. The diocese press office also would not give names, numbers or details at this point, citing the ongoing investigations.

The diocese runs a total of about 20 schools, 570 child care facilities and numerous youth groups.

Huemmeler is familiar with some individual cases, however. She mentioned a man who was abused as a child in the 1970s in a home for handicapped kids. He contacted the diocese to tell his story just this week — again leaving the church leadership shocked and ashamed.

"It is all really terrible, but we are going to listen to everything," Huemmeler says.

Last week, the diocese confirmed the case of a priest who was transferred in 1980 to Munich. That came after three sets of parents alleged he had abused their children in the northwestern city of Essen, the diocese there said. The priest underwent therapy, but then returned to work with youngsters. He was convicted of abuse in 1986.

Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was Archbishop of Munich and Freising at the time of the priest's transfer from Essen to Munich. The diocese has said Ratzinger knew about the transfer but not about the priest's continued work in Bavarian congregations after he assumed his duties at the Vatican.

A psychoanalyst who said he treated the recently suspended Rev. Peter Hullermann for 12 years after the initial allegations of sexual abuse, said the priest resisted the idea of having to go through therapy and saw himself as a victim.

"He never accepted these conditions," Werner Huth told the AP in a telephone interview. "It was impossible to use certain forms of therapy with him that I believed were necessary."

Huth had wanted Hullermann to stop drinking and to have a supervisor with him at all times — neither of which the priest would accept.

Erwin Wild, then spokesman of the diocese's council of priests, said he and his colleagues were not informed by Ratzinger that the priest was an offender, which he thinks was wrong.

"We should have known," Wild said.

Meanwhile, the sex abuse scandal has reached Italy, with the bishop of the northern diocese of Bolzano apologizing to victims and promising to go to prosecutors for any cases that rest within the statue of limitations.

Bishop Karl Golser issued an apology late Thursday, after several victims came forward alleging physical and sexual abuse at a Bolzano convent and church school in the 1950s and 60s.

Golser also launched an Internet campaign to urge more victims to come forward, setting up an e-mail address — molestia(at)bz-bx.net — for victims to report claims of abuse.