Pope Had No Knowledge of Transfer, Vatican Says, Rachel Donadio, The New York Times, March 26, 2010

Pope Had ‘No Knowledge’ of Transfer, Vatican Says

By Rachel Donadio
The New York Times
March 26, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/europe/27pope.html

Pope Benedict XVI met with Guatemala’s President Alvaro Colom, right, during a meeting in his private apartment at the Vatican on Friday.

ROME — The Vatican on Friday reaffirmed its position that the future Pope Benedict XVI “had no knowledge” of a decision to allow a known pedophile priest to resume pastoral duties when the pope was archbishop in Munich in 1980.

In a statement, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that an article that appeared in The New York Times on Friday, which said that the future pope had been sent a memorandum relating to the reassignment of the priest, “contained no new information.” The Vatican rejected as “speculation” any version of events other than the one it originally put forward to explain what it called the pope’s “nonresponsibility” in the matter.

The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising has said that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, had approved a decision to transfer the troubled priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, into his diocese for therapy to overcome pedophilia. But the diocese said that Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy at the time, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber, took full responsibility for the decision to reassign the priest to pastoral duties a few days after his therapy began.

Father Hullermann went on to molest boys in another parish and was later convicted of sexual abuse of children.

The German Archdiocese had not previously mentioned in its statements that Cardinal Ratzinger was sent a memorandum relating to the reassignment of Father Hullermann. In his statement on Friday, Father Lombardi did not comment directly on the memorandum.

A growing sexual abuse scandal in Europe has raised questions about Benedict’s role in handling the sexual abuse case in his own diocese in 1980, and in overseeing such cases when he was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal official from 1982 until his election as pope in 2005.

In the statement, Father Lombardi said, “The then vicar general, Msgr. Gerhard Gruber, has assumed full responsibility for his own erroneous decision to reassign” Father Hullermann.

The Times article quoted the Rev. Lorenz Wolf, judicial vicar at the Munich Archdiocese, as saying that the memorandum, which he called routine, was “unlikely to have landed on the archbishop’s desk,” but said he could not rule out that Cardinal Ratzinger had read it.

Father Wolf spoke with Father Gruber this week at the request of The Times. He said that Father Gruber told him he could not remember a detailed conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger about Father Hullermann, but that he refused to rule out that “the name had come up.”