The Daily Beast
Clerical sexual abuse in Germany aggravated under German Pope Benedict XVI
Tony Gentile via Reuters A highly anticipated report on clerical sexual abuse and cover-ups in Germany’s powerful diocese of Cologne, released on Thursday, identifies 202 perpetrators against 314 victims – 55 percent of whom were under 14 years of age. The report blames “years of chaos, subjectively perceived lack of competence and misunderstandings” for rampant abuse. The 800-page report also points to a sharp increase in abuse between 2004 and 2018, said Björn Gercke, the lawyer who presented the report on Thursday. German Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 and resigned in 2013. The Vatican’s response to 1,000 children abused by priests? ‘No comments’. Prior to that, Ratzinger headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals firsthand with reports of abuses from distant dioceses. There, he was criticized for minimizing the Boston Church scandal in 2002, which led to the Boston Globe’s investigations into the film Spotlight. Before that, he was the archbishop of Munich, where he decided to go to therapy instead of punishing a proven predatory priest. As pope, he took a tougher line, removing dozens of priests who had been proven abusers, but remained silent when the choir led by his brother, who is also a priest, turned out to be a sadistic sex camp for children. In 2019, six years after retiring, Ratzinger wrote an editorial in which he blamed sexual freedom and the collapse of moral standards – not a church that did not adequately protect children – for the problem, writing “in the 20s from 1960 to 1980, the previously normative standards regarding sexuality have completely collapsed. The Cologne report analyzes the results of a 2018 study by the German Episcopal Conference that identified 1,670 clergy committing sexual violence against 3,677 minors, most of whom were boys between 1946 and 2014, according to German state media Deutsche Welle. The report accused a number of senior Church officials, including Archbishop of Hamburg Stefan Hesse and Cologne Archbishop Joachim Meisner, of breach of duty, but gives a pass to current Cologne Archbishop Rainer Maria Woelki, who commissioned the report , but was widely criticized for censoring the release of a preliminary report last year. Speaking before the report was released, Georg Baetzing, the president of the German Bishops’ Conference, called the suppression of Woelki’s first report a “disaster” and said that Woelki “completely failed as a moral authority”. The investigation, however, did not reveal that he violated his duties. The German church currently pays victims of clerical sexual abuse about € 5,000 “in recognition of their suffering”, as well as therapy bills. The report released on Thursday is a second report and was published by an independent law firm against Woelki’s recommendation. After the report, Woelki said that the clergy mentioned in the report would be dismissed. “What we saw clearly shows that there was a cover-up,” he said. “I am embarrassed.” Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top news in your inbox every day. Subscribe now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper into the stories that matter to you. To know more.