Worshippers Revolt in Church As German Catholic Leaders Admit Abuse, Roger Boyes in Berlin and Ruth Gledhill, The Times, April 2, 2010

Worshippers Revolt in Church As German Catholic Leaders Admit Abuse

By Roger Boyes in Berlin and Ruth Gledhill
The Times
April 2, 2010

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7085974.ece

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch said that the Church had committed serious mistakes and done too little to help the victims of abuse

German Catholic leaders openly admitted for the first time today that the Church betrayed and abused children in its care.

The admission by Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, came as Catholic priests across the country called on their congregations to pray for abused children.

But in many churches worshippers took the unusual step of expressing their unhappiness with the Church's management of the crisis.

Archbishop Zollitsch said that the Church had committed serious mistakes and done too little to help the victims of priestly abuse. “The caring responsibility towards the victims was insufficient in the past because of our own disappointment at the painful failure of the perpetrators, and out of a falsely understood concern for the standing of the church," he said.

It was as close as the Church in Germany has come to admitting that it covered up crimes committed by priests.

That, he said, was the "painful reality that we have to face up to". The Archbishop's words were notably blunter than those used by the Pope the previous day.

On Maundy Thursday he did not refer directly to the child abuse revelations now spreading across continents and confined himself to calling on Christians to respect the law.

Archbishop Zollitsch has already had to apologise for not turning over a paedophile priest in his diocese to the state prosecutor.

On Thursday France became the latest European country to implicate paedophile priests, one accused of assaulting a boy in 1992 and 1993 and another of possessing pornographic images of minors.

At the Jesuit-run Saint Canesius church in Berlin, worshippers at the Good Friday High Mass were asked to pray for Pope Benedict and the bishops of the church.

The priest appealed: "Let us pray for the children who have been done great injustice within the church community, who were abused and damaged in body and soul and for those who have sinned against children and others in their care." Half of the congregation, perhaps 150 people, remained silently standing in a rare flash of defiance. Similar scenes were reported from across the country.

More than 20 out of 27 dioceses had agreed to integrate the prayers into the service. The formula — openly acknowledging the victimhood of the children molested by priests — had been worked out by Stephan Ackermann, Bishop of Trier, the Church's expert on abuse. Last week he introduced a hotline for victims and found that 20 of the callers claimed to have been abused in his own diocese.

"No, the prayer for the children wasn't a surprise," said one of the Berlin worshippers. “It was relief. But did you notice there were only three families in the congregation? That was unusual here. But, at the moment, churches are not places you take children." The victim hotline, belatedly set up, was a defensive move, the act of a church at bay. Non-Catholic organisations are already operating dedicated phonelines and encouraging victims to step forward, name names, and make claims for financial compensation. The abuse victims — well over 300 in Germany — are starting to mobilise and to lose their fear of public embarrassment.

"We are learning daily about the methods of education in Catholic institutions in Austria in the 1960s and 1970s," said Holger Eich, working a hotline for the Austrian group Platform for Victims of Violence by the Church. About 174 cases have come forward in the past fortnight.

"These methods can be summed up in one word — sadism," Dr Eich added.

Public opinion in the German-speaking Catholic world has rarely been so nakedly hostile to the Church. The German and Austrian Church leaderships thus decided that they should use Easter to apologise and admit mistakes rather than wait for a declaration from the Pope.

Archbishop Zollitsch told of the Church's "mourning, outrage and shame . . . wounds have been ripped open that can no longer be healed".

The new candour of the Church could, the Archbishop said, mark a new beginning. "That is something that we all so desperately need."

John Allen, the Vatican commentator, said yesterday that the crisis had taken an enormous financial toll. The current estimate is that dioceses, religious orders, and other Catholic institutions in America have paid $2.5 billion (?1.6 billion) in settlements, with perhaps another $1 billion on the table in pending lawsuits. Seven dioceses and a religious order have declared bankruptcy.

Mr Allen wrote on the Washington Post website: "This crisis has taken a terrible toll on the Catholic Church and I suspect it's far from over. While the crisis has erupted in the United States and parts of Europe, it really hasn't yet reached the southern hemisphere ... Latin America, Africa and Asia . . . where two thirds of the 1.1 billion Catholics today live.”