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	German Church to Probe Abuses By Vanessa Fuhrmans Wall Street Journal July 13, 2011 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304223804576443991011177136.html?mod=googlenews_wsj Catholic Church leaders in Germany plan to launch one of Europe's most comprehensive investigations to date into a child sexual-abuse scandal that ignited and spread across the Continent more than a year ago. The move underscores the extent to which the church continues to reel from the clergy abuse scandal, particularly in Pope Benedict XVI's native Germany. Together with independent criminological researchers, church officials are initiating the probe ahead of the pope's highly anticipated visit to Germany in September. During the trip, Pope Benedict is likely to come under renewed pressure to address the church's handling of past abuse cases, including those in Germany during his tenure as the archbishop of the Munich Archdiocese from 1977 to 1982. While a number of Germany's 27 Catholic dioceses have launched archival searches of past abuse cases since the scandal first erupted in Berlin in January 2010, the new investigation will take a more systematic, empirical approach. Bishop Stephan Ackermann of the Trier Diocese, who was appointed last year as the German bishops' point man in dealing with the scandal, said the audit wasn't just to trace and re-evaluate the handling of old abuse reports, but to better understand how they happened in the first place so officials could develop better prevention strategies. "We want to learn the truth that may lie still undiscovered in the files of decades past," he said at a news conference. Led by the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony—an independent advisory group that focuses on long-term crime-research projects—investigators will audit the personnel files of priests and other clerical staff from the past decade to review old abuse cases, church officials said. In some instances, victims and alleged perpetrators would be contacted again for additional information. In particular, German Catholic officials want to examine where a set of abuse case-handling guidelines revised in 2002, in the aftermath of the church abuse scandal in the U.S., may have fallen short. Nine of the 27 dioceses plan to grant access to files dating back as far as 1945 in order to conduct a more long-term study of the evolution and aftermath of abuse cases. In an additional abuse-research project, a team of commissioned academic forensic psychiatrists will conduct an analysis of psychological reports that were written as part of abuse cases reported over the past decade with the aim of enabling church officials to better spot warning signals of potential abuse. Though the abuse scandal is no longer a daily fixture of German newspaper headlines, the church is still recovering, particularly financially. Preliminary numbers show considerably more German Catholics, who help finance the church through a small fraction of taxes by declaring their church membership to the state, left the church rolls in 2010, compared with the nearly 124,000 Catholics who left in 2009. Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at vanessa.fuhrmans@wsj.com
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