German archbishop says church failed abuse victims to protect reputation; new cases in Austria

German archbishop says church failed abuse victims

BERLIN — The head of Germany’s Roman Catholic bishops said in an unusually forthright Good Friday statement that the church in the pope’s homeland failed to help victims of clerical sex abuse because it wanted to protect its reputation.

A victims’ group that runs a new hot line in Austria said that dozens of people had reported new allegations of sexual abuse by priests and Catholic church employees, and about 100 others had described verbal or physical mistreatment.

In Italy, the prosecutor who oversees sex-crime cases in Milan told the Il Giornale newspaper that there is a long list of priests who are under investigation for alleged sex abuse. He did not elaborate.

The Catholic church has been rocked by a widening abuse scandal in Pope Benedict XVI’s homeland and across Europe in recent weeks as hundreds of allegations of harsh physical punishment and sexual abuse have been made.

Clerics have neglected helping abuse victims by a “wrongly intended desire to protect the church’s reputation,” Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg said on the day that Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The news about sexual and physical abuse of children by priests and other employees leaves the church with “sadness, horror and shame,” he said.

Reports of new cases have been cropping up almost daily in neighboring Austria, where the country’s top Catholic, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, held a service for victims and acknowledged church guilt in the controversy this week.

Austria’s Platform Of Those Affected By Church Violence — a group that includes victims, psychologists, psychiatrists and lawyers — said about 150 people had called a new hot line, with about a third claiming they had been sexually abused and the rest reporting physical or verbal abuse.

“We’re dealing with a lot of sadistic education methods from the 60s and 70s,” Holger Eich, who supervises the hot line, told reporters. “I hope that most of these methods are no longer being used in church institutions — but I’m not sure.”

Zollitsch condemned what he called “the appalling crimes of sexual abuse” and urged the German Catholic church to face its painful record on the handling these cases.

The church is appalled by the harm done to victims who were often unable to speak about their pain for decades, he said.

“Wounds were inflicted that are hardly curable,” the bishop added.

Zollitsch urged all priests in his diocese to pray during Good Friday services for abuse victims whose bodies and souls were hurt within the church’s community, to whom “great injustice was done.”

Cardinal Karl Lehman, the bishop of the German city of Mainz, echoed Zollitsch’s tough stance and called perpetrators of sexual abuse traitors of the gospel.

“They weaken and betray the gospel of Jesus Christ who himself has put a special emphasis on the children,” he said is his homily.

In 1980, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, allowed a pedophile priest to be transferred from the northwestern city of Essen to undergo therapy in Munich, where he was then archbishop.

The Munich archdiocese says Benedict wasn’t involved in a lower-ranking official’s later decision to allow the priest to return to pastoral work. The Rev. Peter Hullermann went on to work with youths again and was sentenced for sexual abuse in 1986.

Germany’s prestigious Regensburg Domspatzen boys choir once led by the pope’s brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger, as well as the school that sends many students to the choir, also have faced allegations of sexual and more general physical abuse.

An Associated Press tally has documented 73 cases with allegations of sexual abuse by priests against minors over the past decade in Italy, with more than 235 victims.

Italian prosecutor Pietro Forno said that once investigations have gotten under way, church officials have never tried to interfere or hinder the probes. But he added, “In the many years that I have dealt with this, never — and I stress, never — have I received a single complaint from bishops, or priests. And that’s a bit odd.”

The interview with Il Giornale, a conservative national daily, was published Thursday.

On Holy Thursday, cardinals across Europe used their sermons to defend Pope Benedict XVI from accusations he played a role in covering up sex abuse scandals, and an increasingly angry Vatican sought to deflect any criticism in the Western media.

____

Oleksyn reported from Vienna. Associated Press Writer Alessandra Rizzo in Rome contributed to this report.