They accuse Benedict XVI of not having acted in the face of sexual abuse in the German Church

the pope emeritus Benedict XVI knew of the existence of cases of sexual abuse to young people and minors committed by members of the German Catholic Church when they happened and had reprehensible conduct in at least four of them, according to the authors of a report published this Thursday.

The report has been carried out by a law firm of Munich after the commission from the archbishopric of that city in southern Germany and its authors declared that the more than 1,700 pages documenting cases that occurred between 1945 and 2019 are a “horror story”.

The pope emeritus was archbishop of Munich and Freising between 1977 and 1982, and although the report also criticizes the conduct of other high-ranking officials of the German Catholic Church, the story that refers to Joseph Ratzinger it is the one that aroused the most attention in the long exposure of its content to the press.

The report documents hundreds of cases committed over decades, up to practically the present, and blames the successive ecclesiastical hierarchies for not having acted accordingly, at least, or even covered them up.

In two of the cases attributed to the period in which Ratzinger was in charge of that archdiocese, the abuses were allegedly committed by two clerics who provided spiritual assistance and against whom no action was taken at all.

The report addresses the cases of 497 people, most of them young men and minors, and counts 235 alleged perpetrators of abuse, including 173 priests and 9 deacons, although they consider that there may be many more.

Also, lawyers have concluded that many of the priests and deacons continued to perform their duties after his behavior became known and despite having been the subject of a “relevant conviction” by his superiors.