By Simon Sturdee
AFP
March 16, 2010
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g_ICbQc_NQN7nCXilfXdGNBaH8JQ
GERMANY -- Germany's Catholic Church announced an "abuse hotline" Tuesday and suspended a priest in the pope's former diocese convicted of paedophilia in 1986 who remained in the clergy, even working with minors.
As a scandal over abuse in the pope's native country snowballs, the hotline would from March 30 provide "experts ... for victims, but also for possible perpetrators," the German Bishops' Conference said in a statement.
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| A person walks past the Franciscan church in Bad Toelz, southern Germany |
The German Catholic Church has been thrown into crisis in recent weeks as hundreds of people have come forward alleging they were abused as minors by priests between the 1950s and 1980s.
Similar scandals have also erupted in the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland, while Ireland has been rocked by revelations about cover-up efforts by the head of the Church there in the 1970s.
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| Bad Toelz, southern Germany, and its Franciscan church |
And on Tuesday, a Latin American country was implicated as the Vatican said that three Brazilian clergymen had been removed, one of whom faced criminal charges. The others were suspended pending an investigation.
In the latest case in Germany, a cloister in Bad Mergentheim in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said that a priest, now 80, had been suspended on suspicion of committing abuse against minors in the 1970s.
In a further revelation, a monastery in St Ottilien, also in southern Germany, said on Monday that several monks, now dead, had admitted to abuse in the 1960s. It appealed for victims to come forward.
Accusations of abuse have now been made in around two-thirds of Germany's 27 dioceses in recent weeks including in Munich and Freising, where Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was archbishop from 1977 to 1982.
On Friday, the scandal inched closer to the pope as the diocese said that Ratzinger had approved in 1980 giving Church housing to a priest suspected of child sex abuse while he received "therapy."
The priest, named in media reports as Peter Hullermann, now 62, had been accused of abusing an 11-year-old boy while serving in the western diocese of Essen prior to his transfer to Ratzinger's diocese.
The alleged victim, Wilfried Fesselmann, now 41, told the Bild mass-circulation daily that the priest plied him with alcohol before forcing him into a sex act.
Two years later, by which time Ratzinger had been transferred to the Vatican, Hullermann was given pastoral duties in a Bavarian town and in 1986 was given a suspended jail sentence and a fine for sexually abusing children.
But he remained within the Church, serving as a priest for two decades until 2008 in the 8,500-strong community of Garching. Mayor Wolfgang Reichenwallner told Spiegel magazine he was a "wonderful preacher", portly and jovial.
The pope's former archdiocese said late Monday that Hullermann had now been suspended from his job of the past two years as "tourism pastor" after breaching conditions that he not work with minors.
He has not been accused of further cases of abuse, it stressed. Press reports said he conducted several church services for young people and went on a camping trip with minors last year.
Josef Obermaier, a senior priest charged with overseeing Hullermann, also resigned.
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