The Pope is a pedophile and refuses to take responsibility for what happened on his watch. A leader who claims he KNOWS NOTHING. His brother a pedophile,A pimp and torturer.
Nice family values.
The church appoints a lawyer named Pfister!-NG/G-
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Scandal’s shadow touches pope’s German years
By Nicholas Kulish and Rachel Donadio, New York Times News Service | March 13, 2010
BERLIN — A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged yesterday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes’’ in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.
The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said he had no comment beyond the statement by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which he said showed the “nonresponsibility’’ of the pope in the matter.
The expanding abuse inquiry had come ever closer to Benedict as new accusations in Germany surfaced almost daily since the first reports in January. Yesterday the pope met with the chief bishop of Germany, Archbishop Richard Zollitsch, the head of the German Bishops Conference, to discuss the church investigations and media reports.
Problems in the German church have already come close to the pope, whose brother, MonsignorGeorg Ratzinger, 86, directed a choir connected to a boarding school where two former students have come forward with abuse claims. In an interview this week, Ratzinger, who directed the choir from 1964 to 1994, said the accusations dated from before his tenure. He also apologized for slapping students.
At a news conference following a one-on-one meeting with Benedict yesterday, Zollitsch said the pope was “greatly upset’’ and “deeply moved’’ by the abuse allegations, and had urged the German church to seek the truth and help the victims.
The meeting and news conference occurred before the statement from the Munich archdiocese.
Zollitsch said the German church had vowed to investigate all allegations of abuse, encouraging victims to identify themselves even if the abuse happened decades ago. In recent weeks, hundreds of people have come forward.
“The cases are growing every day,’’ said Thomas Pfister, a lawyer appointed by the German church to investigate cases in the Ettal monastery boarding school in Bavaria. He said more than 100 people have contacted him.
“Every day I receive e-mails from around the world from people who have been abused,’’ Pfister said, adding that the school had posted his e-mail address on its website to encourage this. “There has been a very big silence. Now they want to have a voice.’’
Experts said the scandals could undermine Benedict’s moral authority, especially because they cut particularly close to the pope himself. As head of the Vatican’s main doctrinal arm, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he led Vatican investigations into abuse for four years before assuming the papacy in 2005.
“What is at stake, and at great risk, is Benedict’s central project for the ‘re-Christianization’ of Christendom, his desire to have Europe return to its Christian roots,’’ said David Gibson, the author of a biography of Benedict. “But if the root itself is seen as rotten, then his influence will be badly compromised.’’
When a sex abuse scandal broke in Boston church in 2002, Pope Benedict — then Cardinal Ratzinger — was among the Vatican officials who made statements that minimized the problem and accused the news media of blowing it out of proportion.
But as the abuse case files landed on his desk at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, his colleagues said he was deeply disturbed by what he learned. On his first visit to the United States as pope, Benedict met with abuse victims from Boston and said he was “deeply ashamed’’ by priests who had harmed children.
But victims’ advocates accuse the pope of doing little to discipline the bishops who permitted abusers to continue serving in ministry. The case in Munich, which was brought to the attention of the diocese by the daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, was a result of “serious mistakes,’’ the archdiocese said in its statement.
In the Munich case, a priest from Essen, “despite allegations of sexual abuse, and in spite of a conviction — was repeatedly assigned work in the sphere of pastoral care by the then-Vicar-General Gerhard Gruber,’’ who worked under Benedict when he was the archbishop.
The priest, identified only with the initial “H,’’ was moved to Munich in January 1980, where he was supposed to undergo therapy. Benedict was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982.
In June 1986, the priest was convicted of sexually abusing minors and given an 18-month suspended sentence with five years of probation, fined 4,000 marks and ordered to undergo therapy.
The former vicar-general took full responsibility for the decision to reinstate the priest to pastoral work. “I deeply regret that this decision resulted in offenses against youths and apologize to all who were harmed by it,’’ he said, according to a statement on the archdiocese’s website.
The Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church, said the vicar-general’s claim was not credible.
“Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention.’’
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
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