Germany appoints ombudsman on sex abuse in church (Roundup)

Mar 24, 2010, 14:14 GMT

Berlin - Germany on Wednesday appointed a special ombudsman to receive and investigate allegations of sex abuse dating from the 1950s in Catholic and other private schools.

Christine Bergmann, 70, was German minister of family affairs from 1998-2002. As ombudsman, she is to study cases that happened too long ago to be investigated by police. Germany does not prosecute child sex abuse after the victim turns 28.

In a related development, the Catholic archdiocese of Munich said it had reported to police a complaint that one of its priests had sex with a child in 1998. The priest was transferred to the archdiocese in 1980, at the time when Pope Benedict XVI was Munich's archbishop.

The Catholic church has been accused of neglecting victims and failing to discipline paedophile priests before the Vatican cracked down in 2001. Ex-teachers at a non-religious boarding school, the liberal Odenwald School, have also been accused of sex with pupils.

Kristina Schroeder, the current family affairs minister, said her predecessor was ideal for the ombudsman task, having launched a German programme against sexual violence as minister and having acted as an ombudsman for social welfare claimants.

Catholic leaders have apologized for redeploying priests who had criminal convictions for sex with children. The Munich archdiocesan official who reappointed a paedophile priest resigned last week.

That priest was again convicted in 1986. Munich archdiocese said he was now suspected of child sex abuse in connection with his work saying mass for holidaymakers at Alpine ski resorts. He has now been removed from all church work.

More than 200 Germans have also disclosed that they were groped or spanked semi-nude by teachers at Catholic schools between the 1950s and late 1980s. Non-Christian institutions have also been accused of abuses.

Adrian Koerfer, a book publishing executive who is a former pupil of the liberal Odenwald School, told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper he had was forced to have sex with several teachers as a boy.

'Ever since, I haven't been able to stand any physical closeness,' he said.

In a related development, Hans Kueng, the dissident Swiss-born Catholic theologian, has accused Pope Benedict XVI of playing a role since 2001 in keeping sex abuse claims out of the public eye.

Kueng's office in Germany confirmed on Wednesday remarks made in a Swiss television interview Sunday in which Kueng referred to a letter sent in May 2001 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the world's bishops.

The letter, De Delictis Gravioribus (about serious crimes), instructs bishops to report every case to the Vatican, but to keep such allegations confidential.

'There was not a single man in the whole Catholic Church who knew more about the sex abuse cases than him, because it was ex officio (part of his official role),' Kueng said. Ratzinger became pope in 2005.

'He can't wag his finger at the bishops and say, you didn't do enough. He gave the instruction himself, as head of the Congregation of Doctrine of the Faith, and repeated it as pope,' Kueng said.

The congregation's chief investigator of priestly wrongdoing, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who heads a staff of just nine, last week defended the Vatican, saying it had processed 3,000 cases after Ratzinger's 2001 crackdown on wayward bishops.

Scicluna said bishops were never told to hide cases from the police, but merely to keep allegations private so that child victims and innocent priests facing unsubstantiated claims were not harassed by gossip or hounded by the news media.

Kueng could not be reached Wednesday to explain why he opposed the confidentiality.

The letter, De Delictis Gravioribus, was made public in 2005.

Scicluna said that its prescription of confidentiality was a repetition of a Vatican legal rule of 1922, adding that the Catholic Church's own rules, known as canon law, require bishops to cooperate with government crime investigators.

He said it was 'utterly obvious' that confidentiality and privacy rules were not meant to encourage bishops to hide sex abuse from police.

Most other critics of the church say the main problem was the failure among many Catholic bishops right up to the 1980s to properly investigate sex abuse claims and report them to the police and the Vatican.