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	Pope's Brother Says Slapped Pupils at Choir School Reuters March 9, 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6282UR20100309 The brother of Pope Benedict said in an interview on Tuesday he slapped pupils in the face at a German school where he led the choir, but had been unaware of the brutality of discipline there. Rev. Georg Ratzinger, 86, made the comments to a German paper following charges of sexual and physical abuse in Catholic schools in the pope's native Bavaria. Sexual abuse scandals have also rocked the church in the United States and Ireland. "Pupils told me on concert trips about what went on. But it didn't dawn on me from their stories that I should do something. I was not aware of the extent of these brutal methods," Ratzinger told the Passauer Neue Presse. "If I had known about the excess of force he was using, I would have said something ... I ask the victims for forgiveness," said Ratzinger who led the "Regensburger Domspatzen," or Regensburg Cathedral Sparrows, the official choir for the Regensburg diocese, from 1964 to 1994. "At the start, I also slapped people in the face but I always had a bad conscience," said Ratzinger, who said the school headmaster punished pupils in the same way. The Regensburg diocese is home to one of three Catholic schools in the southern state of Bavaria where the charges of sexual and physical abuse have surfaced recently. The diocese has said one priest abused two boys sexually in 1958 and was sentenced to two years in jail. Another clergyman served 11 months in jail in 1971 for abuse. Other former pupils have said they suffered sexual abuse and excessive beatings and humiliation in the early 1960s by unnamed teachers. German Pope Benedict, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, taught theology at Regensburg University from 1969 to 1977. SEXUAL ABUSE Reports last month said Catholic priests had sexually abused over 100 children at Jesuit schools around Germany. Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops Conference, has issued a public apology and is due to travel to the Vatican on Friday to discuss the scandal. Ratzinger acknowledged he physically punished students but said he never beat them to an abusive extent, and that he and his Regensburg colleagues never talked about sexual abuse. He said he was glad when corporal punishment was banned in 1980. The Catholic Church has faced charges of abuse in several countries. Pope Benedict summoned Irish bishops to the Vatican last month for a scolding over a pedophilia scandal after a government report said Church leaders had covered up widespread abuse of children by priests for 30 years. More than 200 Catholics in the Netherlands have come forward to report alleged sexual abuses by priests, often decades ago. The Dutch Roman Catholic Church said on Tuesday it was asking an independent commission to look into the reports. The Archabbott of the Salzburg monastery of St. Peter, Bruno Becker, 64, offered his resignation on Monday after confessing to having abused a boy 40 years ago, when he was a monk. The victim, who is now 53 years old, said Becker had abused him in a grotto during a bicycle trip. He also accuses two other Benedictine monks of having abused him sexually decades ago. Austria's Catholic Church was last rattled in 1995, when then Vienna archbishop Hans Herrmann Groer was accused of child abuse. He never commented on the accusations but resigned from his post later.
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