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  The Pope, His Brother and a Church Reeling from Scandal

By Roger Boyes
The Times
March 19, 2010

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7067868.ece

The Ratzinger brothers with the Domspatzen choir

The time is 7am and an old, almost blind priest makes his way to the altar of the small St Johann church tucked in the shadows of the mighty Regensburg Cathedral. Later, after Mass, I try to approach the 86-year-old cleric and he waves his white stick at me, fending off the unknown, the prurient press.

Perhaps Georg Ratzinger, the choleric former choir director of the Domspatzen — the celebrated Cathedral Sparrows — was simply in a hurry to get to breakfast. There is no doubt, however, that he and his younger brother Joseph — now better known as Pope Benedict XVI — are on the defensive.

The revelations of priestly paedophilia sweeping through the Catholic world are shaking the trust of hundreds of thousands of ordinary believers. About 300 alleged victims have come forward in the past weeks and many more add their voices every day. Father Ratzinger’s cathedral choir is one of a dozen Catholic teaching establishments where children were abused by priests. Benedictines, Capuchins, Jesuits; all the great church orders are suddenly having to deal with adults seriously damaged by their school years.

Compared with the disclosures made in the Irish and American Catholic communities, the scale in Germany is modest, but the Pope is plainly rattled: the Church could soon be exposed to an unprecedented level of state intervention, an erosion of independence. The Government is demanding that state prosecutors investigate cases of sexual abuse because, apparently, the church leadership cannot be trusted to put its own institutions in order. To fight off this intrusion, the Pope has to ensure that national churches are not only sympathetic to the victims but also candid about the past. That, of course, threatens the Church’s centuries-old tradition of secrecy — and the serious organisational mismanagement it has been masking.

The Pope faces more than a chorus of angry victims: he is being confronted with an institutional crisis. “It’s becoming like a tsunami,” said the head of the German Benedictine order, Abbot Notker Wolf. “The Holy Father is suffering very acutely.”

Many of the institutions where sexual abuse or harassment took place are in Bavaria and known to the Pope when he was Archbishop of Munich. His proximity to the crime scene has rattled the German church leadership, which has tried to create a firewall between him and the dark stories of priests molesting children in their care.

So far the only direct link between the Pope and the child abuse cases is Father Peter Hullermann. After being caught making sexual advances to teenagers in Essen, Father Hullermann was transferred in 1980 to Munich, where Joseph Ratzinger was Archbishop. The future Pope approved the man’s transfer on condition that he received weekly therapy — but he was also given a job in a Munich parish that allowed him regular contact with children. In 1986 he was given a suspended jail term for sexually abusing children again.

Joseph Ratzinger almost certainly knew nothing of the later career trajectory of Father Hullermann, but a pattern had been set: he was shifted around Bavaria; to Garching parish, well known to the Ratzinger brothers since it was close to their home town, and on to the spa town of Bad Tolz.

When his background was revealed at the Trinity Church in Bad Tolz last Sunday, a 30-year-old parishioner stood up in the middle of the service. “I was due to have my marriage blessed by Father Hullermann,” he shouted. “Why weren’t we told?”

The priest, Father Rupert Frania, told The Times: “What could I tell him? I, too, wasn’t told — I feel like a sacrificed pawn in a much bigger game.”

A spokesman for the Munich bishop’s office, however, claims that Father Frania did know. Father Hullermann — by all accounts a popular figure — has duly been suspended and at least one administrator has been dismissed, yet the confusion about the case lingers on. The impression is that the Church has ordered the shutters to be brought down on it — fast.

The reason is clear: church institutions are hierarchical. If you head a diocese, and you are conscientious, you generally know what is going on in the parishes. The big test of the Church will be to convince ordinary believers that knowledge about abuse was confined to a small circle within the offending schools and choirs.

Miguel Abrantes Ostrowski, 37, a respected stage actor, was one of the first to blow the whistle. He was a pupil at a Jesuit school in Bonn, the Aloisiuskolleg, between 1983 and 1993. Ten years later he wrote a lightly fictionalised account of his years at the school.

“It wasn’t just paedophilia, it was power abuse,” Mr Ostrowski told The Times. “And it was tolerated. The rector (who has recently stepped down to allow investigations against him) was the protege of his predecessor. So the same structures continued; it was as if the rector was the legislature, the executive and the judiciary rolled into one. There was no control over his power.

“One priest would shower naked with us. And we would regularly have our temperatures taken with a thermometer pushed into our bottoms.” Photographs were taken then, too.

Worse cases are being reported — including instances of boys being passed from priest to priest as sexual playthings — but they all boil down to the teachers feeling that they were somehow beyond the gaze of the law.

Most of the cases emerging so far are from the 1950s and late 1960s, when the schools were run with extraordinary brutality. Joseph Haslinger, an Austrian writer, remembers how he was regularly caned in the 1960s. “In this area of churchly violence, paedophile teachers were an oasis of tenderness. The seminary saw an excess of both, of violence on the one hand and intimacy on the other hand,” Mr Haslinger, 55, said.

Life in Catholic establishments has plainly improved over the past decade. Karl Birkenseer, author of a book about the Regensburger Domspatzen, says: “The Second Vatican Council [1962-1965] helped open up the Church and its organisations.” After that, he says, came the changes in society itself: the growing influence of parents, access to TV and sources of information that broke the isolation of boarding schools. “It has gotten better.”

Georg Ratzinger was a product of his time. He admits now, and publicly regrets, cuffing the ears of his choristers.

“The thing about Georg Ratzinger is that all his anger would subside after choir practice and he would not hold anything against you afterwards,” says Mr Birkenseer, who was a Cathedral Sparrow. This week a dozen former Sparrows have come forward to praise his teaching and modesty.

Of course, what matters, ultimately, is not whether the brother of the Pope threw chairs around in a rage, as some magazines are claiming, but how much he knew about paedophile teachers.

‘Protecting the perpetrators’

The first of the recent claims of clerical sex abuse in Germany were made in January by 20 former students of the Canisius College in Berlin. Since then, about 300 former Catholic students have come forward with similar claims, many dating back to the 1950s and 1960s

At least two priests have been suspended but many cannot be taken to the criminal courts because of the statute of limitations: victims must contact police within ten years of their 18th birthday

Bishop Stephan Ackermann has been appointed by the Catholic Church to look into the allegations. “There were instances of suppression,” he said in a newspaper interview. “We were too focused on protecting the perpetrators”

 
 

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