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	Former Chorister Makes Sex Abuse Claim against Georg Ratzinger's Choir By Richard Owen The Times March 23, 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7073279.ece Georg Ratzinger, the Pope's brother, was drawn further into the paedophile scandal embroiling the Catholic Church yesterday after a former member of the school choir that he ran claimed to have been sexually abused. Although Monsignor Ratzinger, 86, recently admitted slapping choirboys while running the renowned Domspatzen choir in Bavaria, he also said that was never aware of any sex abuse during his tenure as choirmaster from 1964 to 1994. He is not implicated in the allegations. However, Clemens Neck, a spokesman for Regensburg diocese, which includes the school, said that sex abuse allegations against four priests and two nuns were being investigated and that one inquiry related to claims made by a former Domspatzen choirboy that a teacher abused him for months in 1971. The teacher, identified by German media as Father Sturmius W, had been a theology student and an assistant at the Cathedral boarding school attached to the Regensburg choir, and subsequently became a priest. Father W, 61, was stripped of his duties last week after the former chorister came forward last week. The accuser, who was 11 at the time of the alleged abuse, was named by Stern magazine as Alexander Probst, now 50. The latest allegations, after a spate of other claims in Germany and in several Catholic countries around the world, have shaken the hierarchy of the Church, culminating in an unprecedented apology by the Pope last Saturday for decades of abuses committed by members of the Catholic clergy in Ireland. The latest allegations in Bavaria exceed the statutes of limitations for criminal prosecution in Germany since all but one stem from before the mid-1970s, and the other dates from 1984. Nonetheless the diocese was investigating the allegations and forwarding information to state prosecutors. Seven people altogether had made allegations of abuse against the six people now under investigation, and others had come forward with allegations concerning people now dead, Mr Neck said. He added that the two nuns involved were elderly and suffering from dementia, and it was "nearly impossible" to interview them. Georg Ratzinger's brother Joseph, now Pope Benedict XVI, was promoted from Munich to Rome in 1982 to be Vatican head of doctrine. He decreed in 2001 that clerical sex abuse cases should be investigated internally rather than handed to the police, and imposed "papal confidentiality" on the inquiries, a decision criticised as part of concerted effort to cover-up abuse allegations. The Pope has also come under fire because Father Peter Hullermann, a priest accused of molesting boys in Essen, was allowed to transfer to the Munich diocese for "therapy" in 1980, a move approved by the current Pontiff. Father Hullermann was later allowed to return to pastoral work, including work with children, and in was 1986 convicted of further incidents of sexual abuse. Even then he returned to the Church and was allowed to minister until the allegations surrounding him surfaced earlier this month.
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