The Schönstatt Movement has published a long statement rejecting the evidence that their founder, Joseph Kentenich, was guilty of sexual abuse.
The movement said: “We firmly reject the accusation that Joseph Kentenich was guilty of sexual abuse of members of the Schönstatt Sisters of Mary. His behaviour toward other persons – especially women – was always marked by a pronounced reverence and esteem, as well as by the principle of physical intactness, which he also impressed upon his communities,” the statement insists.
Vatican documents from the Pius XII archives show that the founder of the Schönstatt Movement, Fr Josef Kentenich, was accused of both power and sexual abuse by Schönstatt religious sisters and that the Vatican believed them and consequently exiled Kentenich.
In an article in the conservative German Tagespost, church historian Alexandra von Teuffenbach says that the true reasons why in 1951 Kentenich was exiled by the Holy Office – the predecessor of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) - have now been revealed by documents from the recently opened Pius XII archives.
According to Teuffenbach’s report, the Holy Office believed the reports of Kentenich’s manipulative abuse of power and sexual abuse which several Schönstatt sisters accused him of during a two-year visitation conducted by Fr Sebastian Tromp SJ from 1951-53. Tromp, a theologian, who taught at the Gregorian at the time, later became secretary of the Theological Commission during the Second Vatican Council. The numerous letters which the Schönstatt sisters wrote to Pope Pius XII describing Kentenich’s abusive behaviour have been found in the archives.
The Holy Office finally exiled Kentenich to the US in 1951. He was rehabilitated under Pope Paul VI in 1965 and returned to Schönstatt. A beatification process for Kentenich was opened in 1975.
This is not the first time that a member of the Schönstatt Apostolic Movement has been accused of abuse. In October 2018, the German prosecution authorities launched an investigation against Chilean Archbishop José Cox, a Schönstatt member, who was living in Germany at the time. In 2002, Cox had been moved from Latin America to Vallendar near Koblenz in Germany, where the Schönstatt Movement was founded, after voluntarily resigning as Archbishop of La Serena in Chile for sexually abusing minors.
When (in 2018) the German authorities accused him of sexually abusing “at least one minor” in Vallendar, the Schönstatt Fathers admitted that they had failed to “respond appropriately to the abusive situations committed by Cox.”
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