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	Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals Creep Closer to the Vatican National Secular Society March 12, 2010 http://www.secularism.org.uk/119169.html Just when the Vatican thought it had shrugged off the Irish child abuse scandal (as it has done so many other scandals), another horror story emerges in the Pope’s native Germany. This time it all comes rather uncomfortably close to home for the Ratzinger brothers, Josef and Georg. Many are now wondering how long it will be before sex abuse cases come to light in the archdiocese of Munich, where the Pope was Archbishop from 1977 to 1982. German church officials said on Wednesday that they will examine what — if anything — Herr J. Ratzinger knew about abuse during his time as Munich archbishop. “We do not know if the pope knew about the abuse cases at the time,” church spokesman Karl Juesten told The Associated Press. He said the church “assumes” Benedict knew nothing of such cases, but that current Munich Archbishop Reinhard Marx will be “certainly investigating these questions”. The Pope’s brother, Georg, has admitted that he “slapped children in the face” during his time as leader of the Regensburger Domspatzen, or Regensburg Cathedral Sparrows, the official choir for the Regensburg diocese, from 1964 to 1994. “At the start, I also slapped people in the face but I always had a bad conscience” said Herr G. Ratzinger. He also said the school headmaster punished pupils in the same way. “Pupils told me on concert trips about what went on. But it didn’t dawn on me from their stories that I should do something. I was not aware of the extent of these brutal methods,” Herr G. Ratzinger told the Passauer Neue Presse. “If I had known about the excess of force he was using, I would have said something ... I ask the victims for forgiveness.” Franz Wittenbrink, 61, who sang in the Regensburger Domspatzen choir from 1958 to 1967, told the Associated Press that he was physically abused on a regular basis by the priests at its boarding school. He told AP: “Severe beatings were normal, but Ratzinger did not belong to the group of more sadistic abusers ... but I do accuse him of covering up the abuses.” Wittenbrink said all boys suffered some physical abuse but a “selected group” of students was also abused sexually. The German magazine Spiegel reported Mr Wittenbrink as saying that the Etterzhausen boarding school had an “elaborate system of sadistic punishments combined with sexual lust,” and that a priest had masturbated with pupils in his apartment. “I find it inexplicable that the pope’s brother, Georg Ratzinger, who had been cathedral bandmaster since 1964, apparently knew nothing about it,” the magazine quoted Mr. Wittenbrink as saying, adding that a fellow student committed suicide. Another former choir boy at Domspatzen told the Bild daily that he and other boys were sexually abused by teachers at the choir’s boarding school in the 1950s. Manfred von Hove was quoted as saying he “finally wants to have answers and find out who was responsible for the cover-up at the time.” He said he planned to sue the Regensburg Diocese for compensation. The Regensburg diocese is one of three Catholic schools in the southern state of Bavaria where the charges of sexual and physical abuse have surfaced recently. The diocese has said one priest abused two boys sexually in 1958 and was sentenced to two years in jail. Another clergyman served 11 months in jail in 1971 for abuse. Other former pupils have said they suffered sexual abuse and excessive beatings and humiliation in the early 1960s by unnamed teachers. The present Pope, who was at the time known by his real name, Joseph Ratzinger, taught theology at Regensburg University from 1969 to 1977. Reports last month said Catholic priests had sexually abused over 100 children at Jesuit schools around Germany. Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops Conference, has issued a public apology and is due to travel to the Vatican on Friday to discuss the scandal. But Germany’s Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said that the Vatican was building a “wall of silence” around the abuse problem. Vatican officials have been unable to hide their alarm about the possible implications for the papacy. “There is certainly the suspicion that there are some out there out to damage the church and the pope,” said a Vatican official, trying the old tactic of making the Church into the victim. And now the scandals are spreading to other countries. More than 200 victims have come forward in the Netherlands in the past week with reports of abuse, often from decades ago, after a report by Radio Netherlands Worldwide that three priests had abused pupils at a boarding school. Dutch bishops have offered their “deepest sympathy and apologies”, and have ordered an external, independent investigation. Meanwhile, the Archabbott of the Salzburg monastery of St Peter, Bruno Becker (64) offered his resignation this week after confessing to having abused a boy 40 years ago, when he was a monk. The victim, who is now 53 years old, said Becker had abused him in a grotto during a bicycle trip. He also accuses two other Benedictine monks of having abused him sexually decades ago. Austria’s Catholic Church was last rattled in 1995, when then Vienna archbishop Hans Herrmann Groer was accused of child abuse on an epic scale over decades. He never commented on the accusations but resigned from his post later. On Monday, the BBC’s Newsnight programme carried a report about the way a Catholic priest, Bill Carney, who was a compulsive and very active paedophile, was permitted to continue his rampage despite being well known to the Church authorities. He is still evading justice, even though one of his victims committed suicide. You can see the whole appalling story here. All this does not stop the bishops employing their well-proven tactic of deflecting attention from their culpability by accusing others of persecuting them. This trick worked very well for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor after he was accused of covering up child abuse when he was Bishop of Arundel. As more and more damning evidence was uncovered, the Church accused the BBC and other media outlets of ‘victimising’ the Archbishop. In that instance it worked. The BBC immediately dropped its investigations and the media clammed up about the whole sickening business. Murphy O’Connor retired with honours, rather than being sent to prison. Now the Bishop of Elphin in Ireland, Christopher Jones, has accused the media of being “unfair and unjust” to the Catholic Church because of its insistence on talking about the Church’s guilt in covering up abuse. “Could I just say with all this emphasis on cover-up, the cover-up has gone on for centuries, not just in the church… It’s going on today in families, in communities, in societies. Why are you singling out the church?” he asked. He continued: “I object to the way the church is being isolated and the focus on the church. We know we’ve made mistakes. Of course we’ve made mistakes but why this huge isolation of the church and this huge focus on cover-up in the church when it has been going on for centuries? It’s only now, for the first time ever, that victims have been given a voice to publicly express their pain and their suffering. And, before that, for centuries, no one spoke.” Others are also making excuses for the Church, claiming that child abuse is just as common in other areas of life. Andrew Brown in the Guardian has taken a well-deserved pasting from readers of his Comment is Free blog on this issue.
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