Benedict gained a global and firsthand knowledge of the scope of the problem when he took over at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1982, after his time in Munich. Ratzinger took the then-revolutionary decision in 2001 to assume responsibility for processing those cases after he realized bishops around the world weren’t punishing abusers but were just moving them from parish to parish where they could rape again.
Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, who was Munich’s archbishop from 1982 until Marx took over in 2008, was faulted over his handling of 21 cases. Pusch said he also denies wrongdoing.
The report runs to nearly 1,900 pages, including annexes among which are Benedict’s written responses, redacted to black out names.
It points to at least 497 abuse victims over the decades and at least 235 suspected perpetrators, though the authors said that in reality there were probably many more.
In an extraordinary gesture last year, Marx offered to resign over the Catholic Church’s “catastrophic” mishandling of clergy sexual abuse cases, declaring that the scandals had brought the church to “a dead end.”
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 Francis rejected his resignation offer.
That report cleared Cologne’s archbishop of wrongdoing, but Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki’s handling of the issue infuriated many Catholics. In September, the pope gave Woelki a several-month “spiritual timeout” after what the Vatican called “major errors” of communication.
By GEIR MOULSON Associated Press
Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared here.
