Word: huth
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...been fired from his job as a counselor at a Bavarian spa town, the priest at the center of the German Catholic Church scandal paid a visit to the man who had been his therapist in Munich when the troubles began back in the 1980s. Dr. Werner Huth describes his former patient as now being a "broken old man and very depressed." But, he says, "the priest still sees himself as a victim...
...interview with TIME, Dr. Huth paints a portrait of the priest known as Father H., accused of sexually abusing boys in the archdiocese of Munich and Freising, then run by Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Father H., says the psychiatrist, "was narcissistic, like other pedophiles, and I repeatedly warned church officials in the 1980s that he shouldn't be allowed to work with children or young people." Dr. Huth says the priest came to him in 1980 after he was transferred to Munich to undergo therapy. As Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Ratzinger approved the transfer from...
Such were his concerns about the priest's pedophilic tendencies that Dr Huth said he set three conditions when he started treating Father H: that he shouldn't be allowed to work with children, he should give up alcohol, (because he allegedly committed the acts of abuse when he was drunk), and that he needed a mentor, someone who could supervise him at all times. The doctor said he made these requirements clear to church officials during a number of conversations, including an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Munich and Freising. "Father H. never fulfilled these conditions," says Huth...
Then in 2008, Dr. Huth says he received a call from a church official who told him that Father H. was still working with children. Indeed, for more than 20 years, the priest worked as a curate and parish administrator in the picturesque Bavarian town of Garching an der Alz, where he had regular contact with children and had supervised 150 altar-boys. The official had stumbled across old files which raised alarm bells. "I was horrified as there was no way this man should have been near children," Dr. Huth, now 80, told TIME from his house in Munich...
While there's been feverish speculation in the German media about the Pope's role in the Father H affair, Dr. Huth says he thinks that Archbishop Ratzinger did not know about the case, simply because it seems unlikely that he'd be aware of everything that happened in his diocese. But the psychiatrist criticised church officials for turning a blind eye to the priest's history of abuse by not launching a thorough investigation. "Senior figures in the Catholic Church covered up the allegations of abuse in order to protect Father H and the church's image," Dr. Huth...