Word: bartsch
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have one place left in the world where a man can speak freely and not fear retribution." Why should a man not be punished for murder? The Roman Catholic Church is not alone in encouraging the abrogation of individual responsibility: but the monstrous immorality of its stand in the Bartsch case demonstrates too well what effect official sanction of such abrogation can have...
Last week Jurgen Bartsch, 21, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the four murders. On the stand, he not only admitted the killings and confessed attempts to abduct 70 other children, but also allowed that he had sought ab solution from a priest after attacking his first victim. In Germany, the trial and its ghastly revelations have stirred a bitter debate on whether the confessional should be inviolate when it is privy to admissions of crime...
...with parishioners. The privilege of the confessional is acknowledged by courts in most West ern countries. In West Germany, for example, both Catholic and Protestant clerics - as well as psychiatrists dealing with mental patients - are exempt from a law requiring citizens to report any knowledge of crimes committed. The Bartsch case, however, has stirred an extraordinary amount of outcry against the silence of the priest involved be cause of the peculiarly repellent nature of the crimes...
...illegitimate son of a tuberculous war widow and an itinerant Dutch street singer, Jurgen Bartsch was adopted in 1954 by a Catholic couple. According to his own testimony, he was sexually molested by a male relative when he was eight, and in puberty displayed homosexual tendencies. All of Bartsch's victims were boys, all had been lured away from carnivals, all had been killed in an abandoned air-raid shelter. On the witnessstand, Bartsch described in detail how he had attempted anal intercourse with two of the boys, masturbated over them, then slaughtered the children as a butcher would...
Essential to Integrity. Since Bartsch admitted that he had told a priest of the first killing, letters have poured into German newspapers, protesting that had the confessor not remained silent, the three other boys might be alive today. Nonetheless, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers have overwhelmingly defended the priest and confessional secrecy. On purely practical grounds, they contend, the secret confession probably prevents far more crimes than it hides, by providing an emotional outlet for disturbed persons...