GERMANY
Salon
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
Today in irony: Catholic church leaders are having trust issues.
A sweeping independent investigation into sex abuse charges dating back nearly 70 years has screeched to a halt in Germany, because the German Bishops Conference there says “The trust was shattered” between the conference and the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony. The bishops have now canceled their contract with the institute.
The head of the institute, Christian Pfeiffer, lashed back at the bishops Thursday, citing old-fashioned butt-covering as the cause of the falling out. “The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising clearly demanded that all texts must be submitted to them for approval,” he said, “and they made it clear to us that they also had the right to prohibit the publication of texts.” He added, chillingly, “They have a requirement that you have to destroy the papers ten years after the conviction of a priest. They kept us in the dark about this, because we agreed in the contract to an analysis of records going back to 1945.”
German Bishops’ Conference spokesman Matthias Kopp has denied Pfeiffer’s charges, saying, “Because the Catholic church is ready to undertake a research project of this kind, it shows how much freedom of research means to it … There has been, to our knowledge, no destruction of documents. A major problem was data protection regulations. It was important to us to clarify how we would be able to anonymize data and keep it safe.”
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