COLOGNE, Germany (AP) – A report commissioned by the German archdiocese of Cologne on the handling of past cases of sexual abuse by Church officials found 75 cases in which senior officials neglected their duties. The discoveries on Thursday prompted the archbishop of Hamburg to offer his resignation to Pope Francis.
The report commissioned by the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, absolved Woelki himself of any negligence towards victims of abuse.
However, Woelki’s late predecessor, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, has been accused of two dozen unlawful acts, such as not following up or reporting cases of abuse, not punishing the perpetrators or not caring for the victims. Meisner retired in 2014 and died in 2017.
Hamburg Archbishop Stefan Hesse, formerly a senior Church official in Cologne, was blamed for 11 cases of negligence in his duty.
Later on Thursday, Hesse posted a video statement in which he admitted that he had made “mistakes” in the past, and said that he was very sorry to have caused the victims or their relatives new suffering “by my action or inaction”.
“I never participated in cover-ups,” he said. “However, I am prepared to take my share of the responsibility for the failure of the system.”
“To avoid damaging the post of archbishop and the archdiocese of Hamburg, I am offering my resignation to Pope Francis, and I am asking him to release me from my duties immediately,” he said.
There was no immediate comment from the Vatican, and Francis was unlikely to act quickly with Hesse’s offer. At 54, Hesse is more than 20 years away from the normal retirement age for bishops. Francisco had already refused, at least initially, to accept resignations when they were offered repentance for handling sexual abuse cases inappropriately, although he did give in over time.
The lawyer responsible for the report, Bjoern Gercke, told reporters in Cologne that his investigation covered the cases of 314 victims of abuse – most of them boys under the age of 14 at the time of the abuse – and 202 people accused of abuse in the Cologne diocese. since 1975.
The focus was not so much on what the suspects did to victims, but more on whether the church – former and current archbishops, vicar generals and other high-ranking church officials – responded correctly to allegations of abuse.
In all, the report found 75 cases in which eight high-ranking officials neglected their duty to monitor, report or sanction cases of alleged abuses by clergy and lay church officials, and did not care for the victims.
Woelki has infuriated many local Catholics in recent months, citing legal concerns to keep a first report on how local church officials responded when priests were accused of sexual abuse. He commissioned the new report – an 800-page investigation based on the church’s archives and prepared by a German law firm.
Gercke said the first report, from a Munich law firm, also concluded that the current archbishop was not guilty of any wrongdoing. The archdiocese of Cologne has the largest number of Catholics in Germany, around 1.9 million.
In an initial response to the new report, Woelki said the investigation confirmed his fears that senior officials were guilty of failing to report the perpetrators and therefore prevented their prosecution.
“My predecessors are also to blame – as of today it is no longer possible to say ‘We didn’t know’,” said Woelki, adding that he would send the report to the Holy See in Rome.
Woelki said he would also temporarily suspend two Cologne church officials based on the findings of the investigation. One of them, auxiliary bishop Dominikus Schwaderlapp, also said that he had offered his resignation to the pope. The report concluded that Schwaderlapp neglected his duty to report and report allegations of abuse in eight cases.
German Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said that the report once again demonstrated “the horrible sexual violence that children and adolescents had to endure in Catholic institutions”.
“Child abuse is not an internal affair of the church, but a crime that must be examined and decided by the criminal courts,” said the minister.
Jens Windel, 46, founder of a support group for survivors of clergy abuse, watched a live broadcast of the press conference on the report on his laptop with other victims outside Cologne’s historic cathedral.
The report, he said, “trivializes the seriousness of the cover-ups that have occurred”.
There was fierce criticism of Woelki’s delivery of the previous report. The head of the German Episcopal Conference, Bishop of Limburg, Georg Baetzing, described the crisis management in Cologne last month as a “disaster”.
A Cologne court announced last month that it was increasing the number of nominations available to people looking to formally leave the church to 1,500 a month, from 1,000 as of March, amid strong demand.
Revelations about past sexual abuse have plagued the Church in Germany and elsewhere for years.
In 2018, a report commissioned by the church concluded that at least 3,677 people were abused by the clergy in Germany between 1946 and 2014. More than half of the victims were 13 or younger when the abuse occurred, and almost a third of them were altar boys.
In January, a new system devised by the church to compensate victims of abuse came into effect. It provides for payments of up to around 50,000 euros (about $ 60,000) for each person. In an earlier system in place since 2011, payments averaged around 5,000 euros.
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Kirsten Grieshaber reported from Berlin. Geir Moulson in Berlin and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.