Church in the World

Pressure mounts on Church as abuse crisis spreads

The Vatican this week was forced to respond to the burgeoning crisis over sexual abuse by clergy, after new revelations emerged in Holland and Austria, the number of alleged victims in Germany reached 300, and the Pope’s brother himself faced questions about what happened in the cathedral choir that he directed for 30 years.

The Dutch Church has received 350 complaints since the announcement last week that the Dutch Salesians are investigating claims that three pupils in a school in the south-east were abused in the 1960s.

In Austria, the Archabbot of St Peter’s in Salzburg, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in the German-speaking world, resigned after admitting that he abused a 12-year-old boy 40 years ago. And in Germany, the number of accusations of sex abuse made by former pupils of the Benedictine Abbey of Ettal in Bavaria reached 100, as Mgr Georg Ratzinger, 86, denied that the issue of sexual abuse came to his notice when he was Master of Choristers of the Regensburger Domspatzen, Germany’s oldest boys’ choir, from 1964 until 1994.

A former singer in the choir has alleged that a former head of the school where the choristers boarded abused pupils. “The issue of sexual abuse never came up but if I had known with what exaggerated brutality he [the former headmaster] had proceeded, then I would have said something at the time,” Mgr Ratzinger told the Passauer Neue Presse on Tuesday. “I slapped boys but I never beat them black and blue,” he said, adding that all corporal punishment at the school stopped when it became illegal in 1980.

On Tuesday, Fr Federico Lombardi, the Holy See’s press spokesman, defended the Church in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands saying they responded to sex abuse revelations with “timeliness and decisiveness” and a “willingness for transparency”.

In a statement issued on Tuesday he said errors made by church institutions and personnel were “particularly reprehensible given the educational and moral responsibility of the Church”, but insisted that sexual abuse of minors was a problem in all of society. 

Fr Lombardi denied that the Vatican had created a “culture of silence” with a 2001 letter to bishops from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled, De delictis gravioribus, arguing that the document was actually “a decisive warning to remind the episcopacy of the seriousness of the problem and a concrete impulse for the creation of operative norms to confront it”.

Mgr Ratzinger told the Rome daily La Repubblica on Sunday that he believed “a certain spite or hostility towards the Church” was partly behind the revelations.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the highest-ranking German at the Vatican after the Pope, told La Repubblica on Saturday that it was time to “seriously clean up” the Church. “In the face of such serious crimes, carried out at the cost of harm to innocent minors by priests and Religious, there is no justification or tolerance. The guilty must be condemned and the victims compensated,” the cardinal said. He insisted that Pope Benedict was “certainly not just standing by idly”, and expressed hope that he would offer “a more general analysis” of the problem of sexual abuse in the entire Church in his anticipated letter to Catholics in Ireland. The Pope was due to meet Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, president of the German bishops’ conference, yesterday. The two were expected to discuss the abuse crisis in the previously scheduled meeting.

The German minister for family affairs, Kristina Schröder, has meanwhile invited relevant groups – churches, school authorities, family organisations, doctors – to roundtable talks on 23 April to work out “codes of behaviour” for those in contact with children. More than 300 alleged abuse victims from Catholic institutions have come forward to date.

Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier,  recently appointed chief coordinator for sex abuse cases by the German bishops’ conference, welcomed Ms Schröder’s invitation. Last week, Archbishop Zollitsch said he saw little sense in such talks. The Dutch bishops on Tuesday ordered an independent inquiry into the abuse charges to be led by Wim Deetman, a former education minister.