German bishop accused of corporal punishment (Roundup)

Mar 31, 2010, 16:40 GMT

Augsburg, Germany - A German Catholic bishop was accused Wednesday of administering corporal punishment to children 30 years ago as a scandal over sex abuse and violence grew in the homeland of Pope Benedict XVI.

The office of Walter Mixa, bishop of Augsburg, vehemently denied the claims that he spanked and slapped children in an orphanage in the southern town of Schrobenhausen while he was a junior priest.

Many German Catholics have been embittered at revelations that Catholic clergy groped, fondled or thrashed children in hundreds of cases between the 1950s and the 1980s. In a few cases, it has emerged that priests were convicted of rape.

The church has been accused of hampering inquiries at the time and even the pope has come under fire for a 1980 decision when he was archbishop of Munich to employ a priest with a history of paedophilia.

A woman, 47, who asked not to be quoted by name, told the German Press Agency dpa that she had been physically punished by Mixa on several occasions before the state of Bavaria outlawed corporal punishment in schools and institutions in 1980.

Mixa is the first of Germany's 27 bishops to be personally accused of any abuse. In Germany, the scandal has widened to include sex abuse at both church and non-church schools and the corporal punishment Germans have not experienced for the past 30 years.

The woman said she was smacked while Mixa was parish priest of Schrobenhausen and a member of the board of an orphanage run by nuns, which mainly catered to children who came from broken homes or were too difficult for their parents to manage.

'They were blows to the face with the palm of his hand or his fist,' she said. She said she was once hit so hard that she fell over onto a bed. On another occasion, as a 14-year-old, Mixa caught her smoking while walking down a street, she claimed.

He had slapped her so sharply that the cigarette flew out of her mouth. 'He went full tilt at me,' she said. 'Whenever we were naughty, the nuns would threaten that the parish priest would deal with us.'

A newspaper, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, reported that other complainants said Mixa hit them with his fists.

The bishop's office later issued a statement saying, 'At no time and in none of his functions has Bishop Mixa ever maltreated children.'

It said the reports were 'absurd, untrue and evidently concocted with the aim of personally discrediting the bishop' because he was 'a prominent representative of the Catholic Church.'

Pope Benedict's brother, Georg Ratzinger, 86, admitted this month he had slapped misbehaving children employed to sing in a world-famed boy's choir at Regensburg Cathedral. He was director of music there from 1964 to 1994.

Ratzinger, now retired, said on radio that most teachers had been deeply relieved when Bavaria state outlawed corporal punishment in 1980, seven years after the rest of Germany, and teachers were no longer expected to hit children as part of their job.

The statement from Mixa said the diocese reserved the right to sue those making the claims.

But the co-leader of Germany's opposition Greens party, Claudia Roth, called for an independent inquiry. She said those making allegations had to be guaranteed safety and must not face any threats.

Mixa, who is a leading conservative in the German Catholic church, was parish priest in Schrobenhausen from 1975 to 1996, when he was appointed bishop of Eichstaett. In 2005 he moved to Augsburg.