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	German Minister Hits out at Vatican over Abuse Expatica March 8, 2010 http://www.expatica.com/de/news/german-rss-news/german-minister-hits-out-at-vatican-over-abuse_29372.html Germany's justice minister hit out at the Vatican on Monday over a child sex abuse scandal engulfing the country's Roman Catholic Church, including at a choir formerly run by the pope's brother. Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said that a "wall of silence" at all schools was particularly prevalent at Catholic-run schools because of a 2001 Church directive that cases of abuse be "subject to papal confidentiality." This meant that allegations of abuse "were not supposed to go outside the Church but instead were meant to be investigated internally," the minister told Deutschlandfunk radio. The German Catholic Church has been rocked in recent weeks by a snowballing scandal over abuse of children at Church-run schools dating back several decades. The scandal in Germany broke in January when an elite Jesuit school in Berlin admitted the systematic sexual abuse of its pupils by two priests in the 1970s and 1980s. It has since spread to other schools as more and more victims come forward, including a boarding school attached to the Domspatzen, a thousand-year-old choir run by Georg Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI's brother, between 1964 and 1993. None of the priests concerned is expected to face criminal charges because the alleged crimes took place too long ago, experts say.
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