Before leading the Catholic Church like Benedict XVI, and before he was a powerful cardinal and the main guardian of the doctrine of Vatican, Joseph RatzingerArchbishop of Munichattended a meeting in 1980 About a priest in Northwest Germany who was accused of committing child abuse.
It’s not clear what exactly happened during the meeting, but afterwards, the priest was transferred and, during the following 12 years, he passed through different parishes of bavaria before ending up in the small town of garching an der Alz, where he sexually abused 12-year-old Andreas Perr.
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“It’s so heavy,” Perr said, smoking cigarettes outside the home where he was sexually assaulted, just steps from the white steeple of the town church. He said that the abuses he suffered led him down the path of drugs and prisonwhile the archbishop Ratzinger he had risen through the ecclesiastical ranks. when talking about Benedict XVI, the retired pope who died Saturday, said he sometimes thinks “of the power one person could have over your life.”
Andreas Perr, who was sexually abused by a priest when he was 12 years old, in Garching, Germany. January 3, 2023.
Last year, a report commissioned by the Catholic Church in Munich accused Benedict XVI of mishandling cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by priests. Benedict apologized for any “serious misconduct”but denied wrongdoing.
The scourge of child sexual abuse in the Church persecuted Benedictfrom the beginning of his rise through the hierarchy to his final year as a frail and retired pope, when the Munich researchers added yet another complication to a legacy that is deeply conflicted.
For his supporters, he is the leader who met the victims for the first time and, above all, he was the one who forced the Church to face its demons, change its laws and get rid of hundreds of cures abusers. He raised the age of consent and included vulnerable adults in laws protecting minors. Allowed statute of limitations on sexual abuse to be overridden.
For his critics, he protected the institution over the victims, failed to hold accountable not a single bishop for protecting abusers and did not back up his words with actions. He preferred to maintain discipline at home, never demanding that cases be reported to civil authorities.
“We can be grateful for what Benedict XVI did in taking the fight against abuse in the Church to a new level by introducing stricter procedures and new laws,” said the Rev. hans zollner, one of the Vatican’s leading experts on the issue of child protection and sexual abuse. “He was the first pope to meet with abuse survivors. At the same time, given the report that during his years as Archbishop of Munich he did not pay the necessary attention to the victims of abuse or hold the perpetrators accountable, we cannot ignore that the victims and other affected people are suffering”.
Perr, now 38, is still trying to rebuild her life after what she suffered at church. And he no longer belongs to the Catholic Church.
As the archbishop Ratzinger As he rose through the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Perr’s life fell into a deeper and deeper abyss. His mother refused to believe her, and he ran away from her home to live on the streets, where he began using strong drugs like heroin.
“After it happened, I started having nightmares,” he said. “That was what made me start using drugs. I wanted to stop dreaming, stop feeling guilty and disgusting. I just didn’t want to feel anything.”
Over the years, Perr ended up in prison twice and was paroled only last year.
A photo of Pope Benedict XVI on the day of his funeral, next to the altar of the Sankt Nikolaus Church in Garching, Germany. January 3, 2023.
At that moment he found criminal lawyer Andreas Schulz, after learning that he was representing other victims of abuse committed by the same priest. Together, they decided to aim higher: they would file a civil suit, not only against the priest accused of sexually abusing him and several children in garchingbut also against Archdiocese of Munich and against Joseph Ratzingerwho at the time was its archbishop.
before passing away, the emeritus pope hired a large law firm international and said he planned to defend himself in the trial that would begin this year. Now, Schulz and his client plan to continue the case even after his death, and they still want to hold Benedict XVI, or the heir to his estate.
Schulz said it could even be the successor to Benedictthe dad Francisco, who inherits the case, should he become Benedict’s heir. The lawyer argued that the Church should accept the trial as an opportunity to finally clarify the complicated history he left behind. Benedict XVI.
“His theological achievements are a part of his legacy,” Schulz said. “But there are shadows hanging over him, and those shadows can only be removed by doing the right thing and accepting responsibility. That is something that only Pope Francisco can do, and that’s what our trial is trying to achieve: people want transparency, they want accountability, they want compensation.”
Accounts like Perr’s have become painfully familiar in the Church over the past few decades. The revelation of systemic abuse he destroyed dioceses and drove away the faithful in countries around the world.
In USAa scandal that broke out in Boston It has shaken almost the whole country. IrelandOnce a stronghold for Catholicism, it was so decimated by abuse scandals that, in 2010, Benedict wrote the first pastoral letter on the subject of abuse. “You have suffered a lot and I am very sorry,” he wrote. A 2021 report alleged that hundreds of thousands of children in France they had suffered abuses in the Church of that country.
Church leaders, who once saw the crisis as an invention of liberals and lawyers, or a problem in Anglophone countries abetted by anti-Catholic media, now recognize that it is a general problem, and Franciscoafter his own mistakes, introduced rules to make the hierarchy more responsible.
But the supporters of BenedictFrancis, and even his critics, acknowledge that Francis drew on Benedict’s reforms. Before the deluge that overwhelmed the Church, cases trickled in during the 1980s, often in English-speaking countries, and landed on his desk at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In 1988, he lobbied the canon law department of the Vatican — which required lengthy ecclesiastical trials to address the allegations — in order to give him more latitude to quickly remove abusive priests. But his request was denied, on the grounds that such a move would deprive priests of due process and, as a result, bishops. they tried to cure the abusers with sentences Y therapies or they were simply relocated to other parishes where other children were taken advantage of.
But the office of Cardinal Ratzinger nor did he act in egregious cases. In the decade of 1990halted a secret trial of an American priest who had sexually abused up to 200 deaf children and he wrote to the cardinal insisting that the priest had already repented. The man was never removed.
In 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger convinced the dad John Paul II to let him try to control the problem. He drafted a Church law that required bishops to send all credible allegations of abuse to the Vatican, where his office took responsibility for the cases.
In addition, he backed the US bishops who wanted to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy that would expel priests who engaged in a single episode of sexual abuse. When John Paul II came to the end of his pontificate in 2004, the Cardinal Ratzinger ordered a review of the pending cases in his department.
In 2005, for the Good Friday Via Crucis procession at the Colosseum in Romethe cardinal Ratzinger he wrote: “How much filth there is in the Church, especially among those who, within the priesthood, are supposed to belong wholly” to Christ.
When he became the high priest, he disciplined and eventually expelled Martial Maciel Degolladoa serial abuser and founder Mexican of the religious order of legionaries of christ. Being a prodigious fundraiser, Father Maciel had earned the loyalty of Pope John Paul II and his inner circle, who for years blocked the efforts of Benedict XVI to investigate it.
Andreas Perr, left, and his lawyer outside the church building where Perr was sexually abused by a priest when he was 12, in Garching, Germany. January 3, 2023.
“The issue is very varied and complex,” said Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor who resigned in 2017 from a Vatican commission for the protection of minors that was created by Francisco. She said that the fact that Benedict XVI having read as many cases as head of the doctrinal congregation made him “understand the vastness of the problem when he became pope,” and for this reason he implemented new procedures against the sexual abuse.
Collins says it is “unfair to exaggerate” the mistakes he made in handling cases during his own personal ministry, when he was a bishop in Germanybut what Benedictas pope, “did not treat this subject in the necessary depth or pursue it to the fullest.”
For many, didn’t go far enough.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.organ investigation and advocacy group for victims, said in a statement on the day of Benedict’s death that it “left hundreds of guilty bishops in power and a culture of secrecy intact.”
Tuesday night in the cathedral of Munich that Benedict XVI presided over as bishop 40 years ago, the current archbishop, Reinhard Marx, began a mass in honor of the emeritus pope inviting everyone to pray, including “those who have suffered abuse and suffering in the space of the Church. To all those who have received good gifts from Joseph Ratzinger. And to all those who now, at this moment, trust that the goodness and mercy of God will heal everything.
