MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st January, 2022) A German investigation into child sex abuses in the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising on Thursday accused Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI of not acting against four accused clergymen during his tenure as the archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982.
Earlier in the day, German legal firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, commissioned by the archdiocese in 2020 to look into child abuse from 1945 to 2019, finally published its findings. The law firm claims that the former leader of the Catholic Church was informed about the abuse that happened on his watch as the archbishop.
"We believe that he can be accused of misconduct in four cases. Two of these cases concern abuses committed during his tenure and sanctioned by the state. In both cases, the perpetrators remained active in pastoral care," lawyer Martin Pusch said at a press conference in Munich, as quoted by CNN.
According to the Vatican news, the report lists 497 abused children, 247 boys and 182 girls, and identifies 235 perpetrators, including 173 priests.
"The Pope Emeritus, as he has already repeated several times during the years of his pontificate, expresses his shock and shame at the abuse of minors committed by clerics, and expresses his personal closeness and prayer for all the victims, some of whom he has met on the occasion of his apostolic journeys," Archbishop Georg Ganswein, the Benedict XVI's personal secretary, told reporters, as quoted by the Vatican News.
The scandal around widespread sexual abuses and pedophilia in the Catholic Church in the US erupted in 2002 when the Boston Globe newspaper published the results of an investigation into such practice in the local Catholic community. After that, it turned out that the problem existed in Catholic communities around the world. Pope Francis intensified efforts to root out the issue since he to lead the Catholic Church in 2013.
