Press TV
March 9, 2010
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=120458§ionid=351020605
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| AP file photo shows Benedict XVI (R) alongside his brother Georg Ratzinger in Regensburg, southern Germany, in 2006. |
Developments across Europe on Tuesday have intensified a damaging scandal over allegations of child molestation and physical abuse at Catholic-run schools.
Dutch religious leaders ordered a “broad, external, and independent” investigation into alleged crimes committed by pedophile Catholic priests.
The Dutch Religious Conference announced plans for an immediate launching of the probe following a meeting to discuss more than 200 allegations of abuse by former students at several Catholic-run institutions in the Netherlands between the 1960s and 1970s.
The announcement comes as details of repeated sexual abuse of male pupils in Austria's Mehrerau abbey and the Sankt Peter monastery in Salzburg were revealed.
Abbot Anselm van der Linde implicated two Mehrerau priests in the abuses, one involving a male pupil and another, a young male drug addict.
Meanwhile a monastery official in Salzburg said Arch-abbot Bruno Becker had molested an 11-year old boy in the 1970s while consoling him after hearing he had been abused by two monks.
While Catholic institutions in Ireland, Austria, and the Netherlands have been embroiled in the scandal, Pope Benedict XVI's homeland, Germany, is now seeking to see the cases tried despite the passing of the statue of limitation, slamming Vatican's “silence” on the issue.
In a shocking new turn, Pope's brother, Georg Ratzinger, on Tuesday admitted to slapping pupils, but repeated that he had not known about the extent of the physical abuse suffered by choirboys at a famous boarding school in the Bavarian city of Regensburg.
"At the beginning I administered clips round the ear, but I always had a bad conscience about it. I was happy when in 1980 corporal punishment was banned by law," he said.
He was the head of the choir from the mid-60s to the mid-90s, while the Pope spent his five-year term as bishop there from 1977.
Catholic reformers have demanded a public explanation form the Pope over “what he knew and what he did about” the abuse.
Germany's justice minister has accused the Vatican of covering up severe sexual abuse in the Church, urging full cooperation from the institutes and Rome.
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