VATICAN CITY (RNS) New charges of sexual abuse and official negligence in Pope Benedict XVI’s former archdiocese threaten to overshadow the planned release on Saturday (March 20) of the pontiff’s first major document on pedophile priests.
A psychiatrist has charged that the Archdiocese of Munich ignored his warnings about the Rev. Peter Hullermann, an accused child molester under his care, during the time that Benedict served as archbishop there. Benedict led the Munich archdiocese from 1977-1982.
“I said, `For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,'” Dr. Werner Huth told The New York Times, in an interview published on Thursday.
The archdiocese reassigned Hullermann to pastoral work in 1980, shortly after he began therapy for pedophilia.
Five years later, he was again accused of sexually abusing minors, and was convicted the following year, yet he continued to serve as a priest until the Munich archdiocese suspended him on Monday.
Huth said that he never communicated directly with Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, but said he gave diocesan officials several warnings about Hullermann before Ratzinger’s departure in 1982.
Ratzinger’s former vicar general in Munich, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber, has claimed “full responsibility” for the decision to reassign Hullermann to pastoral work.
The Munich archdiocese has received about 120 complaints of physical and sexual abuse, with new reports coming in daily, said Elke Huemmeler, the head of its new sexual abuse prevention task force.
“It is like a tsunami,” she told The Associated Press Friday.
Hundreds of abuse allegations involving Catholic schools in various parts of Germany have emerged since the beginning of this year, prompting an investigation by prosecutors. Last Friday (March 12), Benedict was briefed on the charges by Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, president of the German bishops’ conference.
Charges emerged earlier this month that members of a boys choir directed for 30 years by the pope’s elder brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, were also physically and sexually abused by priests. Ratzinger admitted slapping children but said he was unaware of any sex abuse.
Recent weeks have also brought numerous allegations of sex abuse by Catholic clerics in Austria and Netherlands.
On Saturday, Benedict is expected to release a letter to Irish Catholics, written in response to the many cases of priestly abuse detailed in two Irish government-sponsored reports released last year. It will be the first major papal document in modern times devoted to the subject of clerical sex abuse.
On Wednesday (March 17), Benedict told Irish Catholics that the letter would be a “sign of my deep concern,” which he hoped would “help in the process of repentance, healing and renewal.”
