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	German Catholic Church Creates 'Abuse Hotline' Expatica March 16, 2010 http://www.expatica.com/de/news/german-rss-news/german-catholic-church-creates-abuse-hotline_31285.html GERMANY -- Germany's Catholic Church announced an "abuse hotline" Tuesday, as a priest housed with the current pope's approval in 1980 while suspected of paedophilia was suspended. The hotline, due to start on March 30, will involve "experts being available for victims, but also for possible perpetrators," the German Bishops' Conference said in a statement. The German Catholic Church has been thrown into crisis in recent weeks as more and more people come forward alleging they were abused as minors by priests between the 1950s and 1980s. In the latest case, a cloister in Bad Mergentheim in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg said that a priest, now 80, has been suspended on suspicion of committing abuse against minors in the 1970s. In a further revelation, a monastery in St Ottilien, also in southern Germany, said on Monday that several monks, now dead, had admitted to abuse in the 1960s. It appealed for victims to come forward. Accusations of abuse have now been made in around two-thirds of Germany's 27 dioceses in recent weeks including in Munich and Freising, where Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was archbishop from 1977 to 1982. On Friday, the scandal inched closer to the pope as the diocese said that Ratzinger had approved in 1980 giving Church housing to a priest suspected of child sex abuse while he received "therapy." The priest, named in media reports as Peter Hullermann, now 62, had been accused of abusing an 11-year-old boy while serving in the western diocese of Essen prior to his transfer to Munich and Freising. "I was 11 ... He gave me Bacardi and Coke, then he took off his trousers and forced me into oral sex," the Bild mass-circulation daily quoted the alleged victim, Wilfried Fesselmann, now 41, as saying. Two years later, by which time Ratzinger had been transferred to the Vatican, Hullermann was given pastoral duties in a Bavarian town and in 1986 was given a suspended jail sentence and a fine for sexually abusing children. But he remained within the Church, serving as a priest for two decades until 2008 in the 8,500-strong community of Garching. Mayor Wolfgang Reichenwallner told Spiegel magazine he was a "wonderful preacher", portly and jovial. The pope's former archdiocese said late Monday that Hullermann had now been suspended from his job of the past two years as "tourism pastor" after breaching conditions that he stayed away from minors. He has not been accused of further cases of abuse, it stressed. Press reports said he conducted several church services for young people and went on a camping trip with minors last summer. Josef Obermaier, a senior priest charged with overseeing Hullermann, also resigned.
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