German Priest Compares Church’s Paedophilia Crisis to 9/11, by Giacomo Galeazzi, Vatican Insider, September 21, 2011

German Priest Compares Church’s Paedophilia Crisis to 9/11

By Giacomo Galeazzi
Vatican Insider
September 21, 2011

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/homepage/news/detail/articolo/pedofilia-pedophilia-pedhopilia-germania-alemania-germany-papa-pope-el-papa-8206/

Germany awaits the Pope's arrival

This is the third time, during his pontificate, that Joseph Ratzinger will be visiting his homeland, although he will be the first time he visits the German capital, Berlin, where he will make his much awaited speech before Parliament on Thursday. Benedict XVI had been in Cologne in 2005 for the twentieth World Youth Day event and in Bavaria in 2006.

The Pope’s twenty first international apostolic visit looks to be a very intense one, as he will be visiting three German dioceses: Berlin, Erfurt and Freiburg. He will hold important meetings with representatives of the German Evangelical Church and the Orthodox Churches and with representatives of the Jewish and Muslim communities. The motto chosen for this trip, “Wherever God is, there is a future” (Wo Gott ist, da ist Zukunft), has been borrowed from the Pope’s homily in Mariazell, in Austria, in 2007, and as the Pope’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi said, its intention is to reassert God’s supremacy and his support to humanity, to face the world’s problems. “I believe, Father Lombardi stressed, that this is an important key to interpreting this rich and intense visit. The Pope is expected to give about 17 or 18 speeches, making it, if I am not mistaken, his most speech packed visit since his trip to the Holy Land.” The meetings the Pope will be attending during his four day stay in Germany are highly significance, starting with his meeting with the Federal President Christian Wulff, in the Bellevue Palace, the presidential residence and another one with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, which will take place at the German Episcopal Conference’s Berlin headquarters.

In Erfurt (Martin Luther’s birthplace), the capital of Thuringia, Benedict XVI will lead the ecumenical meeting par excellence, in the city’s former Augustinian Monastery. Here, he will meet with representatives of the Evangelical Church and will take part in an ecumenical celebration attended by approximately 300 people. During the course of the ceremony, a psalm from Luther’s translation of the Bible, will be read out. In the afternoon, Benedict XVI will visit the Marian Sanctuary of Etzelsbach, a place uniquely marked by the Communist persecution of Christians which took place there. The last stop along his journey will be the diocese of Freiburg, a deeply Catholic area of Germany.

Here, the Pope will meet Germany’s former Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, one of the main protagonists in the process of German reunification. Another important meeting will be that between Benedict XVI and the Catholics working for the Central Committee of German Catholics (the ZdK - Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken), which represents the long tradition of the lay people’s apostolate in Germany. The closing meeting will be the Pope’s wake with youngsters from various dioceses all across Germany. Germany is the Pope’s homeland, but it is also a country that presents him with many a challenge. The German Church has been haemorrhaging members for years now.

The paedophilia scandal has not only sped up this exodus, it has also sparked proposals for structural reforms which have been causing division between bishops, priests and faithful. Benedict’s visit to Germany and the choice of motto “Wherever God is, there is a future”, is focused on children. Unlike all his previous international visits, this forthcoming one will not include any meetings at universities or in any centres for disabled people. Germany’s population is one third Catholic, one third protestant and one third atheist, Muslim and belonging to other religions. But more than secularism, which is a phenomenon that is typical of the West as a whole, it is other internal problems that are causing the crisis in the German Church. The paedophilia scandal which exploded last year in many countries across the world has shaken German Catholicism right to its core. This started with the “revolutionary” initiative taken by Klaus Mertes, rector of Berlin’s Jesuit Canisius High School, who invited former pupils to protest, opening the floodgates to a motion which spread to all parts of the Country as well as outside German borders.

In Germany, the Pope will meet a group of victims of paedophile priests. The paedophilia affair has sped up demands for reform in the German speaking Catholic world. One document in particular, signed by 144 German theologians (including Peter Huenermann and Hans Kung), and numerous academics, caused a real stir in the German Church and in the Vatican. It asked for change with regard to questions such as the participation of Catholics in church life, homosexual unions and remarried divorcees. While in Austria, a similar initiative by parish priests (Pfarrer-Initiative) is making headway in the Catholic Church, testing the Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schonborn’s ability to establish dialogue, the German Episcopal Conference has opened a sort of dialogue table with “protesters”, in Mannheim. The episcopate’s top brass, President Robert Zollitsch, the Archbishop of Munich, Reinhard Marx and bishops Overbeck and Bode, informed the Pope about the meeting, in a gathering at Castel Gandolfo last 13 August. The Pope himself then asked the Country’s minister of foreign affairs about the Austrian initiative, during a recent audience in the Vatican. German bishops, which the Pope will not meet in a single meeting during his visit, are divided on these issues. This became evident during a recent interview with “Zeit”, in which Zollitsch mentioned the possibility of giving communion to remarried Catholic divorcees.

“It is about having mercy, we will talk seriously about this,” the head of German bishops said. Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Archbishop of Cologne and friend of the Pope, along with Monsignor Jean-Claude Perisset, the Apostolic Nuncio to Berlin, immediately distanced themselves from this. The subject should not be brought up during the visit, not even because of the fact that the German President Christian Wulff is a remarried Catholic (while Klaus Wowereit, Berlin’s mayor, is an openly gay Catholic). But Zollitsch, the head of the German Church was also “open” to other topics: “Sometimes even I risk getting fed up and I think: why aren’t we moving faster? Sometimes I have to inject patience into myself,” the leader of German bishops said, referring to Church reforms. Rome, the prelate said, “can smell apostasy immediately, while in Germany we argue in a more controversial way.” The Pope knows Germany well, but in Rome, Germany is regarded with suspicion “because it is seen willingly as a country marked by division.”