Report
Original sin
Catholic church child abuse scandal grips Germany.
T he Catholic church in Germany has
been rattled to its core. Over the
past weeks the scandal surrounding
sexual abuse in Catholic institutions has
taken on such great dimensions that
nothing has been able to divert attention
from it – neither the spectacular
resignation of the head of the Protestant
church for being caught drinking and
driving, nor the conviction of the German
Islamist terrorists attempting to build car-
bombs. The church has managed to keep
the country’s media on its toe with one
headline after the other, the most recent
being questions aimed at the Pope.
On January 28, a Berlin daily published
a report about the principal of a Catholic
high school who had sent letters of
apology to about six-hundred alumni. “It
is with deep shock and shame that I take
note of those horrible years of systematic
abuse,” Father Klaus Mertes wrote to the
former students.
Two teachers of the school were
suspected of having sexually abused at
least seven pupils of the all-boys high
school in the 1970s and 1980s. Though
two students had already notified him
in 2004 and 2005, Mertes said he did not
act, because the victims had asked for
confidentiality. In December and January,
however, five other ex-students had
reported that they too had been abused.
“What they told me, compels me to
assume that there are unreported cases
out there,” Mertes wrote in his letter.
He was right. The number of
unreported cases would, however,
turn out to be much higher than he
probably had anticipated, and concern
other Catholic institutions. Besides the
prestigious Jesuit-run high school in
Berlin, alumni of other Jesuit-run schools
in Hamburg and Sankt Blasien reported
cases of sexual abuse.
Later, homes run by the Order of
Don Bosco would be added to the list.
20 March/April 2010
By Lalon Sander
And, finally beginning March, the police
raided a prestigious boarding school in
southern Germany. Apparently, students
had been abused there as recently as
2005. At Father Klaus Mertes’ prestigious
high school, by the end of February, 150
victims had charged at least twelve staff
members with sexual abuse.
Piece by piece the picture came
together with newspapers digging out
more and more victims who told of their
ordeals.
One victim was made to accompany
his teachers into the basement on several
occasions, where he was then abused.
Others spoke of having been taken on car
rides and being touched by the priests.
Still, others reported of having been taken
out of bed at night or having to perform
sexual services, to be allowed to go to the
bathroom.
The lawyer, in charge of investigating
the cases of abuse for the Jesuits, Ursula
Raue, summarised the sexual abuse,
“The victims especially spoke of the
manipulation of genitals and of caresses,
rarely of violence.”
In other cases, victims reported
having to light a candle every time they
masturbated, and then being questioned
meticulously by the priests.
The final picture is one of systematic
The final picture is one of
systematic sexual abuse
by people in positions of
responsibility. A survey
by the SPIEGEL magazine
showed that there have been
ninety-four suspected cases
of sexual abuse in the
past fifteen years.
Independent World report
sexual abuse by people in positions of
responsibility. A survey by the SPIEGEL
magazine showed that there have been
ninety-four suspected cases of sexual
abuse in the past fifteen years. Of these,
thirty were prosecuted. Currently, there
are ten cases of suspected sexual abuse in
Catholic institutions. And yet, these cases
are probably only the tip of an iceberg.
Firstly, there may yet be more cases of
sexual abuse that have gone unreported
and that may come up as time passes.
Secondly and more importantly, however,
there are definitely an exponentially
larger number of cases of abuse that
was non-sexual. Over a hundred former
students at the boarding school in
southern Germany, complained of having
been systematically and brutally beaten by
teachers well into the 1980s and 1990s.
The principal conceded that even today
“mild biffs on the head” were nothing
unusual.
At the same time, a committee
investigating the conditions of children’s
homes in the 1950s and 1960s published a
preliminary report in mid-January. About
two thirds were run by church institutions
– both Catholic and Protestant – and while
most children suffered some form of
abuse, about a third also reported being
sexually abused, usually by wardens,
clergymen, or even other students.
What remains open, is how all these
cases have managed to have remained
unadressed for so long.
Justice will not be done for many
victims as the perpetrators are often dead
or demented from old age. Other cases
are barred since sexual abuse, even in
the most severe cases, is only punishable
up to ten years after the victims reach
adulthood – many of the reports now are
by men and women in their forties.
At the same time, many victims
recounted going to the authorities with
their charges, and nothing being done. At
Pope Benedict XVI: Photo by Oliver-Bonjoch.
the best, the suspects were transferred to
another post, never, however, were the
reasons for the transfer made public or
even made known to the victims or their
new place of work.
One reason why the Catholic church
specifically has trouble addressing such
problems may be a document that was
written up in 1962 and discovered by the
Guardian when a similar wave of charges
came to light about clergymen in the
United States: The Crimine solicitationies.
The confidential sixty-nine-page
document, bearing the signature of
Pope John XXIII, forces even the victims
to take an oath of secrecy under pain
of excommunication – clergymen are
forced to cover up such incidents or face
discipline. The Murphy Report, which
investigated a similar scandal in Ireland
and was released in November 2009,
stated that it had “no doubt that clerical
child sexual abuse was covered up,” from
January 1975 to May 2004.
A central figure in covering up
scandals until the very end seems to have
been a certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
who in 2001 sent a letter to all bishops
asserting that the 1962 document was
still in force and that evidence of sexual
abuse cases was to be kept confidential
until ten years after the victims reached
adulthood.
For the German victims, this would
mean that by the time the Catholic church
made the charges public, they would
have been barred and would no longer be
prosecuted. Cardinal Ratzinger was voted
Pope Benedict XVI, in April 2005.
Perhaps this is why the German
bishops’ conference took more than three
weeks before it made a first statement.
“I apologise on behalf of the Catholic
church in Germany, to all who became
victims of such crimes,” chairman Robert
Zollitsch said. “Sexual abuse of children is
always a heinous crime. And, it is a sin.”
Meanwhile, the laity organisation Wir
Independent World report
sind Kirche (We are church) has demanded
that Pope Benedict XVI be questioned,
because he was archbishop of Munich,
between 1977 and 1982, when some of
the abuse cases in the boarding school in
southern Germany took place.
The current archbishop of Munich
has admitted that a clergyman was
transferred from his post during
Ratzinger’s tenure because of charges of
sexual abuse. Abuse is also said to have
taken place in the school’s renowned
choir group Regensburger Domspatzen,
which was headed for thirty years until
1994 by the current pope’s brother, Georg
Ratzinger. �
Lalon Sander is a Berlin-based journalist
with Die Tageszeitung.
March/April 2010 21