(GERMANY)
360 News [San Francisco, CA]
September 27, 2022
By Daniel Stewart
The Traunstein Regional Court in Bavaria has requested a deposition of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI over a lawsuit filed by a man who was abused by a priest, court spokeswoman Andrea Titz has confirmed.
“The defendants have the opportunity to indicate their willingness to defend themselves within two weeks, after which they have four weeks, or one month, to respond,” she explained.
As reported by German media when the complaint was filed, the plaintiff is a 38-year-old man from Bavaria who alleges he was sexually abused by the priest as a child.
The complaint is directed not only against Benedict XVI, when he was archbishop of Munich and Freising, as well as his successor Cardinal Friedrich Wetter.
The archdiocese also received the complaint earlier this week, its spokesman Christoph Kappes confirmed. “We do not comment on the ongoing court proceedings,” he has merely mentioned.
The so-called declaratory action is not a criminal proceeding, but it can establish guilt of the Church in cases of abuse. In any case, the fact that the court has now initiated written preliminary proceedings does not imply “any substantive assessment of the court’s prospects for the success of the appeal,” the court spokeswoman stressed.
“The question of whether the declaratory relief claim exists despite the statute of limitations for possible claims for damages or damages is only a matter for the further proceedings,” she added.
Earlier this year, Joseph Ratzinger was accused in a report on sexual abuse in the Munich and Freising archdiocese of failing to react in four cases of abusive priests.
Experts from the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) indicated that during his time as archbishop of Munich Ratzinger was at a meeting in which a priest who had abused children was reassigned to pastoral work. The Pope Emeritus first denied having participated in that meeting and later rectified it and attributed it to an oversight.
Following this publication, the Pope Emeritus again apologized to the victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, as he had done during his Pontificate, but firmly rejected the accusations of cover-up.
“I have had a great responsibility in the Catholic Church. My sorrow is even greater for the offenses and errors that occurred during my mandates and in the corresponding places,” he wrote in a statement released in June by the Vatican.
“I have been deeply shocked that absent-mindedness has been used to doubt my sincerity and even to present me as a liar,” he added, also attributing to “absent-mindedness” having initially denied his attendance at a meeting in 1980 when he was archbishop of Munich to decide on a priest accused of child abuse.