BishopAccountability.org
	"I Never Knew Anything" Says Pope's Brother Caught up in Sex Abuse Row By Allan Hall and Christopher Lawton Scotsman March 8, 2010 http://news.scotsman.com/12007/39I-never-knew--anything39.6133885.jp GERMANY'S justice minister has accused the Vatican of covering up severe sexual abuse after reports of cases at three Catholic schools in the Pope's native Bavaria. Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger called the developments "frightening" after the cathedral choir school in Regensburg – once overseen by Pope Benedict XVI's brother – the Benedictine monastery school at Ettal and a Capucian school in Burghausen re vealed new cases of sexual and physical abuse. "In many schools there was a wall of silence allowing for abuse and violence," Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a secular liberal who has been the government's leading critic of the Church, told a German radio station. "Even the most severe cases of abuse are subject only to papal secrecy and should not be disclosed outside the Church," she said, citing a 2001 Catholic congregation directive. But Bishop Stephan Ackermann, who speaks for the Church on abuse matters, called her comments "absurd", adding: "Our guidelines insist that we involve state prosecutors." Bishop Georg Ratzinger, the Pope's brother, has said he was not aware of sexual abuse in the boys choir school in Regensburg that he headed for nearly three decades. "I never knew anything. The incidents that are being talked about go back 50 or 60 years to the 1950s. It was another generation than when I was there," he told Rome daily La Repubblica. "It's also another generation than the one that currently leads the foundation and the choir." The director and composer Franz Wittenbrink, a former pupil of the boarding school attached to the Domspatzen – Cathedral Sparrows – choir, has spoken of an "ingenious system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure" at the school. In comments published in news weekly Der Spiegel, he accused a former head of the school of "taking two or three boys into his room in the evenings," giving them wine and masturbating with them. He told the magazine it was well known what went on at the school, and he "could not understand how the Pope's brother, Georg Ratzinger, who was master of the chapel from 1964, could not have been aware". Mr Wittenbrink was at the school until 1967. Asked about the impact of the scandals, Bishop Ratzinger, 86, voiced concern about a "certain animosity towards the Church" as well as feelings of "resentment and hostility". "It seems to me that behind these affirmations there is clear intention to speak against the Church," he said in reference to the string of recent revelations in the German press. He added he was "entirely ready" to appear before a court if the authorities considered it necessary. Last Friday, Thomas Pfister, a lawyer investigating charges of abuse at the Ettal school, said boys had been beaten and some sexually abused decades ago. "Hundreds were beaten. There were very extreme cases of mishandling, which normally would have been punished with long prison sentences … a cloak of silence was thrown over the charges," he said. One monk, now dead, had committed "serial sexual harassment and sexual abuse", he said. The Rev Johannes Bauer admitted beating pupils while a teacher at the Ettal school from 1985 to 1987. "To my shame, I have to say openly that I also brutally abused children physically and humiliated them," he said. "I am very sorry and ask forgiveness." The Capucian order said a former director of the Burghausen school had sexually abused boys in 1984-85. The charges were investigated in 1991 but no action was taken because the statute of limitations had run out. Despite this, the priest was transferred in 1985 to work in a Munich hospital and later a pilgrimage centre and was only suspended from his priestly duties this month.
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