GERMANY
The New York Times
By MELISSA EDDY
JAN. 10, 2016
REGENSBURG, Germany — The Rev. Georg Ratzinger, the elder brother of former Pope Benedict XVI, said in an interview published Sunday that he had no knowledge that young boys in an internationally known German church choir he directed for 30 years had suffered sexual abuse.
“I did not hear anything at all about sexual abuse,” Father Ratzinger, 91, told a Bavarian regional newspaper, Passauer Neue Presse. “I was not aware that any sexual abuse was taking place at that time.”
Reports of physical and sexual abuse in the choir, the Regensburger Domspatzen in Bavaria, first emerged in 2010 as part of a nationwide wave of revelations linking officials of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany to the mistreatment of children. But an internal report by the church identified only 72 cases of abuse in the Regensburg Diocese, most involving severe corporal punishment.
Last week, Ulrich Weber, a lawyer commissioned by the choir to look into accusations of beatings, torture and sexual abuse, presented his initial findings, based on more than 140 interviews, roughly half of them with victims, and an examination of archives. Mr. Weber estimated that from 1953 to 1992, every third student at a school attached to the choir suffered some kind of physical abuse. He said the mistreatment at institutions linked to the Domspatzen included at least 40 cases of sexual violence.
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