Pope Benedict XVI- German Catholic Church Child Abuse

Pope Benedict XVI's former German diocese says it made a mistake in allowing a priest suspected to have abused a child to return to pastoral work when the pope was archbishop. But it says he was unaware of the decision. The Munich archdiocese said Friday the priest was sent to Munich in 1980 for therapy. It says the man was allowed to stay in a vicarage while undergoing therapy — a decision in which then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger was involved.

The holy father was very satisfied with our decisions,” Archbishop Zollitsch told reporters. “I’m grateful for the encouragement he gave me to continue carrying out our measures in a decisive and courageous way.” The archbishop also asked forgiveness from victims of priestly abuse, echoing earlier apologies he had made in Germany, where newspapers have been filled with reports of physical and sexual abuse of former Catholic school students dating back to the 1950’s and 1960’s.

These events mobilise the Church to find appropriate responses and should be placed in a more wide-ranging context that concerns the protection of children and young people from sexual abuse in society as a whole. Certainly, the errors committed in ecclesiastical institutions and by Church figures are particularly reprehensible because of the Church's educational and moral responsibility, but all objective and well-informed people know that the question is much broader, and concentrating accusations against the Church alone gives a false perspective.

...questions emerged about whether the pope’s brother could have known about physical and sexual abuse at two boarding schools connected to a boys’ choir he directed for 30 years, from 1964 to 1994. Monsignor Ratzinger, 86, has apologized for slapping students in the years before corporal punishment was banned in Bavaria, but he said the allegations of sexual abuse are from a period before he was leading the choir.