GERMANY
Catholic News Service/OSV Newsweekly
September 27, 2018
The head of the German bishops conference formally apologized for sexual abuse in the Church, saying it “has been denied, turned away from and covered up for far too long.”
“Sexual abuse is a crime,” Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising told a news conference Sept. 25 in Fulda, Germany. “And whoever is guilty of it must be punished by law.”
The bishops met in a plenary session in Fulda and released a study, conducted on behalf of the bishops’ conference from 2010 to 2014, on abuse. The study, leaked earlier in September, researched an estimated 3,700 sex abuse cases in the German church.
Cardinal Marx said that, although prevention measures had been put in place by the bishops’ conference, it was not enough.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.