ROME
National Catholic Reporter
by John L. Allen Jr. | Feb. 16, 2013
Rome
One difficulty in assessing the legacy of Pope Benedict XVI on the sexual abuse crisis is that the people making the assessments tend to know more about one end of the equation than the other. That is, they’re either papal observers struggling to make sense of the scandals, or people on the front lines of the scandals trying to understand the pope.
A rare figure with deep expertise in both is Jesuit Fr. Hans Zollner, the academic vice-rector of the Jesuit-run Gregorian University in Rome and head of its Institute of Psychology.
On the papal side, Zollner was born in the Bavarian city of Regensburg, more or less the hometown of Pope Benedict XVI, and holds degrees in philosophy and theology from the University of Regensburg where the future pope once taught. In Rome, he’s had a front-row seat for the last part of Benedict’s tenure at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the almost eight years of his papacy.
In terms of understanding the dynamics of abuse, Zollner’s credentials are equally impressive. He was licensed as a psychologist and psychotherapist in 2004, and in 2010 and 2011 he served as a member of the scientific working group of the “Round Table on Child Abuse” created by Germany’s federal government.
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