By Nicholas Kulish
The New York Times
April 22, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/world/europe/23germany.html
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| Bishop Walter Mixa during a news conference in February in Freiburg, Germany. Photo by Rolf Haid/European Pressphoto Agency |
BERLIN — A German bishop accused of beating children decades ago when he was a priest has tendered his resignation to Pope Benedict XVI, the diocese in Augsburg said Thursday, the latest jolt to the Roman Catholic Church in Germany as it grapples with a swirling sexual abuse scandal.
The accused man, Bishop Walter Mixa, was one of the church’s most prominent and outspoken conservatives in Germany, and he aggressively defended himself for weeks against charges of physically abusing children in a Bavarian orphanage.
Accusations have also surfaced of financial irregularities at the orphanage’s foundation. A lawyer hired by the foundation has raised questions about thousands of dollars spent on wine, art, jewelry and even a tanning bed while Bishop Mixa was chairman of the foundation’s board in the 1990s. Bishop Mixa was a priest in the town of Schrobenhausen from 1975 to 1996.
Bishop Mixa sent a letter to the pope on Wednesday asking to be relieved of his office, the diocese said. Although he was not accused of sexual abuse, his case made headlines across Germany for weeks and focused more negative attention on a church already shaken by scandal.
Opinion surveys here show that the abuse cases and how they were handled by the church have severely damaged the church’s credibility. Municipalities have reported a rising number of Catholics leaving the church since the scandal began. The Augsburg diocese said Thursday that Bishop Mixa had stepped down to prevent further damage to the church and to make a new start possible.
“I ask forgiveness from all of those to whom I have been unjust and all of those I have caused sorrow,” Bishop Mixa said, according to the statement.
The pope has to accept a resignation before it is official. The Vatican does not comment on resignations not yet accepted by the pope, said a spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.
The central focus of the church scandal in Germany has been sexual abuse, but corporal punishment in church-run institutions has also attracted public attention. Benedict’s brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, apologized in March for slapping children during his tenure as the director of a choir in the Bavarian city of Regensburg, where he worked from 1964 to 1994.
In another measure of the scandal’s toll, the Vatican announced Thursday that the pope had accepted the resignation of Bishop James Moriarty of Kildare and Leighlin in Ireland. The resignation came under a code of canon law that allows a bishop to resign before retirement age for a “grave reason” that makes him “unsuitable for the fulfillment of his office.” The normal retirement age for bishops is 75; Bishop Moriarty is 73.
Bishop Moriarty’s resignation was the latest reverberation of the abuse scandal in Ireland, where two government reports last year revealed the sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children and a widespread cover-up. In March, Benedict sent a letter to Irish Catholics in which he apologized to the victims and expressed “shame and remorse.”
On Thursday, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales issued an apology to victims of sexual abuse by priests and called the abuse crisis a “profound scandal” that had brought “deep shame to the whole church.” The bishops designated the four Fridays in May as special days of prayer.
Following other expressions of remorse by church leaders, the English and Welsh bishops condemned the actions of abusive priests, but they also said higher church authorities had failed to act. “We recognize the failings of some bishops and religious leaders in handling these matters,” the statement said. “These, too, are aspects of this tragedy which we deeply regret and for which we apologize.”
The pope has yet to address the scandal in Germany, which has not reached the same scale as the number of abuse cases in Ireland but has nonetheless damaged the church’s reputation and appears to be sapping the ranks of the faithful.
Although there are no nationwide statistics, there is growing evidence from individual municipalities and dioceses, from Cologne in the west to Berlin in the east, that the number of departures from the church is growing, which observers have linked to the abuse scandal.
The German daily newspaper Die Welt reported this week that 1,233 people in Wurzburg left the church in March, compared with just 219 in January. In Freiburg, 2,711 left in March, more than twice the 1,058 who departed in March 2009, the paper said.
But the statistics, which were compiled from various church and civil authorities, can be difficult to analyze in the short term. In Bavaria, home of the Augsburg diocese, the number of Catholics and Protestants leaving their churches are combined. According to the civil registry office in Augsburg, 258 people left their churches in March, compared with 111 the year before.
“These figures speak for themselves to a certain extent, although we do not differentiate between the religions,” Karl Kromer, who runs the Augsburg office, said Thursday by telephone.
In Germany, the government levies church taxes, which are automatically deducted from salaries by the government, generally adding up to just under 10 percent of their total income tax. To leave the church legally here, a person must go to the local civil registry office and ask to have his or her religious status changed.
“There are a large number of people who are on the verge of taking the leap and leaving the church,” said Bernd Jochen Hilberath, director of the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Tubingen. “The Catholic Church has been suffering now for a while under a loss of trust,” Mr. Hilberath said. “What I’m finding in the congregations is that the majority of Catholics want change.”
The accusations against Bishop Mixa first surfaced in March, when the newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung published a report based on six men and women who said he struck them in the children’s home in Schrobenhausen in the 1970s and 1980s. The bishop at first denied the reports, saying at no time had he physically abused children. He later said he could not remember what might have happened.
Hans Joachim Meyer, the former head of the Central Committee of German Catholics, said Thursday in an interview that Bishop Mixa’s case had become a distraction for the Catholic Church as it grappled with the sexual abuse scandal.
“I think it is good and correct that Bishop Mixa has stepped down, and the matter is off the table,” Mr. Meyer said. “Now it is about how one moves forward with the abuse scandal, and in that we are on the right track.”
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