GERMANY
Yahoo! News
AFP News
July 19, 2017
The former choirmaster of a Catholic school in Germany where more than 500 children were abused, including sexually, was a “fanatic” who was “feared” by pupils, his immediate successor said Wednesday.
Georg Ratzinger, older brother of former Pope Benedict XVI, led the famous millennium-old choir in the southern city of Regensburg between 1964 and 1994.
He was “impulsive, even fanatical,” a “merciless” teacher when “imposing his idea of musical discipline,” the current choirmaster, Roland Buechner, told German weekly Die Zeit.
“Afterwards, he could be the gentlest person in the world. Some pupils saw him as a model, others feared him as someone who would beat them,” he added.
Ratzinger, now aged 93, has said he knew nothing about the violence at the school.
But Buechner, 63, recalled that under Ratzinger’s baton, “a system of fear ruled” among members of the choir.
“It wasn’t ‘just’ about slaps, but genuine physical abuse. People raged, there were injuries,” he said.
A report published Tuesday detailed some 547 cases of abuse at the Regensburg school, site of one of the biggest such scandals to have struck the Catholic church in Germany.
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