By Vanessa Fuhrmans
Wall Street Journal
June 3, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704515704575282621275819274.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
German prosecutors said they had begun a preliminary investigation into allegations that the country's highest-ranking bishop had allowed a priest accused of sexually abusing a child in the 1960s to be assigned to a parish some two decades later, in a further escalation of Germany's clerical-abuse scandal.
Prosecutors in the southwestern German city of Freiburg said they launched the investigation after an alleged victim of the priest filed a complaint that Robert Zollitsch, archbishop of Freiburg and the head of Germany's Bishops' Conference, abetted the priest's sexual abuse by reassigning him while Archbishop Zollitsch was the archdiocese's personnel chief in the 1980s. After being assigned to the new parish in 1987, the priest allegedly committed sexual abuse again, according to the complaint.
 |
| Archbishop Robert Zollitsch at a news conference in May. |
The allegations make 71-year-old Archbishop Zollitsch the highest-ranking official to be touched by a sexual-abuse crisis that has shaken the Catholic Church in Germany, though he himself hasn't been accused of any abuse. Freiburg prosecutors also cautioned that the investigation was preliminary and that they hadn't yet had a chance to examine the allegations against the archbishop or the allegations of abuse against the priest.
Freiburg archdiocese officials rejected the allegations against the archbishop as unfounded and "sensation-seeking" and said they were working closely with local prosecutors to resolve the investigation.
In a statement, the Freiburg archdiocese said that it and Archbishop Zollitsch only learned in 2006 that the priest in question had committed sexual abuse in the 1960s, and that Archbishop Zollitsch wasn't responsible for his 1987 assignment. That fell under the jurisdiction of a local Cistercian monastery, which ran the church where the priest was assigned and which has the power to make its own hiring decisions independent of the archdiocese, it said.
The archdiocese added that in 2006, once it learned of the sexual abuse allegations stemming from the 1960s, it alerted church officials in Switzerland, where the priest, who hasn't been named, had since moved. In March of this year, other allegations against the priest, now 69 years old, surfaced, and he was subsequently suspended from his duties there.
The accusation against the archbishop underscores how quickly the abuse inquiry in Germany and elsewhere in Europe has widened beyond the abuse of priests and other clergy to the bishops who were charged with supervising them and handling abuse claims.
In recent months, such criticism has extended to Pope Benedict XVI for the reassignment of an abusive priest in Munich 30 years ago, while he presided over that archdiocese as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The Munich archdiocese has said the pope was never aware of that priest's reassignment and that a subordinate bore full responsibility.
Among Germany's 27 bishops, Archbishop Zollitsch is considered one its more liberal voices. As head of the bishops' conference, which oversees Germany's church hierarchy, he has been seen as instrumental in the German church's efforts to confront the abuse crisis by appointing special investigators and re-examining church policy on dealing with such cases.
In April, Archbishop Zollitsch took the unprecedented step of publicly suggesting that a fellow German bishop, Walter Mixa, take a sabbatical after being accused of flogging children while a parish priest in the 1970s and 1980s. The move helped force the Augsburg bishop to offer his resignation a day later; Pope Benedict accepted it in May.
Bishop Mixa was also accused in May of sexual abuse, but prosecutors closed an investigation into the allegations shortly afterward, citing lack of sufficient evidence. Bishop Mixa has denied the sexual abuse allegations.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.