Former pope Benedict XVI
(Picture: REUTERS)Former pope Benedict XVI has been criticised for failing to act over four cases of child abuse when he was the archbishop of Munich, a report has found.
The former pope, who was then called Josef Ratzinger, held the position in the 1970s and 1980s.
He strongly denies any wrongdoing.
A long-awaited report on sexual abuse in Munich’s diocese by law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl found that abuse happened under Ratzinger’s leadership and accused sex offenders were allowed to continue in their roles.
“In a total of four cases, we came to the conclusion that the then-archbishop, Cardinal Ratzinger, can be accused of misconduct,” the report says.
Two of those cases involved perpetrators who offended while the former pope was in office and were punished by the judicial system but were kept in pastoral work without express limits on what they were allowed to do.
No action was ordered under canon law.
In a third case, a cleric who had been convicted by a court outside Germany was put into service in the Munich archdiocese. The report said the former pope knew of the priest’s previous history.
In another case a suspected pedophile priest was transferred to Munich to undergo therapy. The move was approved under Ratzinger in 1980.
The prelate was allowed to resume pastoral work, a decision that the church said was made by a lower-ranking official without consulting the archbishop.
In 1986, the priest received a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.
In an extraordinary gesture last year, current archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, offered to resign over the Catholic Church’s “catastrophic” mishandling of clergy sexual abuse cases.
Pope Francis swiftly rejected the offer but said a process of reform was necessary and that every bishop must take responsibility for the “catastrophe” of the abuse crisis.
In 2018, a church-commissioned report concluded that at least 3,677 people were abused by clergy in Germany between 1946 and 2014.
More than half of the victims were 13 or younger, and nearly a third served as altar boys.
In recent months, turbulence in the Cologne archdiocese over officials’ handling of abuse allegations has convulsed the German church.
A report last year found that the archbishop of Hamburg, a former Cologne church official, neglected his duty in several cases in handling such allegations, but Pope Francis rejected his resignation offer.
That report cleared Cologne’s archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, of wrongdoing.
But Woelki’s handling of the issue infuriated many Catholics.
He had kept under wraps a first report on church officials’ actions, drawn up by the same firm that produced the Munich report, citing legal concerns.
In September, the pope gave Woelki a several-month “spiritual timeout” after what the Vatican called “major errors” of communication.
Marx, a reformist who sits on powerful financial and political committees at the Vatican, has been the archbishop of Munich and Freising since 2008.
