Word: priests
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Amid controversy, the Vatican's instinct is typically to protect the man at the top, particularly when it comes to what is known in both secular and ecclesiastical terms as scandal. That is evident again with a pedophile-priest controversy from the 1980s in Germany that is threatening to draw in the German-born Benedict XVI, even as his countrymen demand that he respond directly. "The Pope was not part of what happened back then, and he shouldn't be part of it now," a Vatican insider tells TIME. "He should offer the greatest silence possible, not because he doesn...
Benedict himself has been linked to the latest controversies. In the early 1980s, a priest suspected of abuse was transferred to the Pope's former archdiocese in Munich - and that case has raised further awkward questions about the church's handling of abuse allegations. Last Friday, the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising confirmed in a statement that "serious mistakes were made in the 1980s" after the priest, known as "Father H," was moved from the western city of Essen to Munich and was allowed to continue with his pastoral work. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Father...
Church officials in Munich said the Pope, who as Joseph Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, was involved in the decision to house the priest at the archdiocese so he could receive therapy. But the archdiocese insisted that the decision to reassign the priest to pastoral work was taken by Archbishop Ratzinger's then deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, who said he took full responsibility for the decision to allow the priest to return to work. Father H was convicted in 1986 of sexually abusing minors, receiving a suspended prison sentence and a fine. Despite the jail...
...Sunday, some members of the congregation in Bavaria where the priest used to work walked out of Mass in protest, furious after reading reports about the history of abuse. On Monday, the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising announced that Father H was being suspended immediately from his pastoral duties (ministering to tourists in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Tölz) because he had violated the conditions under which he was allowed to work, which prohibited contact with young people. Church officials in Munich said there were no new reports of sexual abuse linked to the priest. His superior...
...addressing the problem. "They have shown a desire for transparency. In a way, they have accelerated bringing the problem to light by inviting the victims to speak up even when the cases dated to a while back," Lombardi told Vatican Radio earlier this week. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of the New York-based Catholic magazine America, says Benedict, too, has been notably more eager than his predecessors to confront the issue of clergy sex abuse, having held an unprecedented meeting with victims on his trip to the U.S. in 2008. (See pictures of the Pope meeting...