German minister cites Vatican secrecy as hindrance in clerical sex abuse probes

German minister: Vatican rule hurts abuse probes

VATICAN CITY — Germany’s justice minister said Monday that a Vatican secrecy rule was complicating prosecutors’ probes of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy in the pope’s homeland.

The Vatican says it wouldn’t comment on Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger’s criticism of what she calls a “wall of silence.”

In a German radio interview, the minister cited a 2001 Vatican directive requiring even the most serious abuse cases to be first investigated internally.

Scandals over sexual abuse by Catholic clergy of minors and cover-ups by church hierarchy have exploded worldwide in the last two decades, including in recent days in Germany and the Netherlands.

Last month the pope led talks at the Vatican with Irish bishops, whose church has been rocked with allegations of decades of systematic sexual and physical abuse of minors in Catholic schools, orphanages and other institutions run by religious orders.

Benedict has a meeting scheduled this week with the head of Germany’s bishops conference.

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger lamented that in the case of abuse at Catholic schools one factor hindering probes is the 2001 directive from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “that even such serious abuse cases are first subject to papal confidentiality and are not supposed to be divulged outside the church.”

That directive was promulgated by the late John Paul II, whose papacy was overshadowed by allegations Vatican officials failed to confront the abuse aggressively.

The German minister expressed dismay that the directive calls for initial internal investigations and doesn’t call for prosecutors to be brought in “as soon as possible.”

For years, the minister has also been honorary chairman of an association fighting sexual abuse of children and providing victims with support.

A prominent German Catholic activist group, We Are the Church, is insisting the pope, who long was a university theology professor in Germany, address whether there was abuse during his tenure as bishop of Munich and Freising between 1977 and 1981.

The Vatican has said it backs German diocesan efforts to look into the “painful question” of sexual abuse “in a decisive and open way.”

Last week, the Regensburg Diocese said a former singer of the church choir later directed by the pope’s elder brother, Georg, has come forward with allegations of sexual abuse in the early 1960s. Georg Ratzinger has said the abuse allegations date from times outside his 30-year tenure as chorus director.

In the Netherlands, Rotterdam Bishop Ad van Luyn has apologized to victims and called for an independent investigation into the sexual abuse of children by priests after 200 alleged victims contacted help services last week. What started as allegations of repeated incidents within a single cloister last month has quickly spread.