The Vatican thus responds to the recent report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Germany.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has condemned sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and was the first to meet with victims, Vatican editorial director Andrea Tornielli said in an article.
The Vatican thus responds to the recent report on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Germany in which four alleged cases of cover-up were cited by the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, when he was Archbishop of Munich (Germany).
“After the publication of the survey, the Pope Emeritus’s years of Bavarian episcopate are in the spotlight. It is fair to recall Benedict XVI’s fight against clerical pederasty and his willingness during his pontificate to meet and listen to the victims and ask them sorry,” highlights the editorial published in the Vatican media.
Tornielli points out that the pope emeritus, “with the help of his collaborators, did not elude the questions of the law firm commissioned by the Munich diocese to prepare the report and responded with 82 pages, after having been able to examine part of the documentation in the diocesan archives.
The editorial director explains that “some of the accusations have been known for more than ten years and have already been published by important international media” and that Ratzinger, and his private secretary, Georg Gänswein, have already announced “that the pope emeritus will make a detailed statement after completing his review of the report.”
Four days after the report on the abuses in the Munich diocese, which implicates him in at least four cover-up cases, was published, the pope emeritus had to retract his first statements.
He acknowledged that he was present at a meeting of the bishoprics of Munich and Freising in January 1980 in which the transfer of a priest accused of child abuse was discussed, according to a statement from Gänswein to the Catholic News Agency (KNA).
However, Ratzinger assured that in that session there was no talk of the priest in question carrying out pastoral work, but only of “making it possible for him to have accommodation in Munich during his therapeutic treatment.”
While awaiting an official response, the Vatican media launched a defense of the German pontiff: “It cannot be forgotten that Ratzinger, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had already combated the phenomenon in the last phase of the pontificate of Saint John Paul II, with whom he was a close collaborator and once he became Pope, promulgated extremely harsh regulations to combat pederasty in the Church”.
In addition, he continues, “Benedict XVI gave testimony, with his concrete example, of the urgency of a change in mentality that is so important to combat the phenomenon of abuse: listening to and being close to the victims, from whom we must always ask for forgiveness “.
Joseph Ratzinger, they point out, that he was the first pope to meet with victims of abuse several times during his apostolic trips and that on a flight to Lisbon in May 2010, Benedict XVI acknowledged that “the sufferings of the Church come from within the Church, of the sin that exists in the Church.” (I)
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