At a news conference to unveil their nearly 1,900 page-long report, the law firm that carried out the investigation said that Benedict, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, could be accused of wrongdoing in four cases, including one in which he knowingly accepted a priest into his archdiocese even after the cleric had been convicted of sexual abuse in a criminal court.
“The present findings indicate that Cardinal Ratzinger had knowledge of the history of the priest,” said Martin Pusch, one of the lawyers involved in the report.
The report, commissioned by the archdiocese in Munich and compiled by German law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, provides an exceedingly rare insight into how someone who went on to become a pope acted behind the scenes in one of the defining crises of modern church. The cases pertain to a time well before the scale of clerical abuse was common public knowledge.
While focus has narrowed in on the former pope’s role, the report, which was released after a midday news conference, looks at more than seven decades of cases within the archdiocese. It identified at least 497 victims over that period, and investigated allegations against 261 people, 205 of whom were clerics. Those figures do not reflect the entire scope of the abuse the investigators believe was happening, Pusch said. “We are convinced that the dark field in this regard is much wider,” he said.
Hundreds of pages of the report focus on one particular pedophile priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann. Allegations first arose against Hullermann in the late 1970s, and in 1980 — when Benedict was archbishop — he was moved from his diocese of Essen to Munich to undergo “therapy.”
The lawyers said that Benedict’s statement that he was not present at a meeting during which Hullermann was reassigned in 1980 was not plausible in their opinion. Ulrich Wastl, another lawyer involved in the investigation, described his response as “surprising” as he was not listed as absent in the minutes of the meeting.
Matthias Katsch, a spokesman for the victims’ group Eckiger Tische, called the report a “historic quake” for the church. “This house of lies that was built here in Munich in order to protect Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, it came crashing down today,” he said.
German press reports have long raised questions over how complicit the retired pope was in enabling the priest to remain in church work involving children and continue to abuse.
In 1986, Hullermann was given a suspended jail sentence for abusing children but he was still allowed to remain in the church. He was only removed in 2010, when it was discovered he was still working in close contact with children.
In the case of the priest with the abuse conviction who was reassigned from overseas, the report said he had been sentenced to one year and four months in prison for a “large number” of cases of serious sexual indecency with male victims aged between 15 and 16 in the 1960s. After he was released from prison, he lobbied to return to Munich, where he was assigned as a pastor by Benedict sometime in the mid to late 1970s, the report said.
As Benedict had holidayed in the diocese, and spent at least part of his time at the priest’s former place of work with his successor, the experts said they suspect he knew about the conviction. “Archbishop Cardinal Ratzinger, through his behavior in this case, unilaterally gave priority to the interests of the church and priests over the interests of the injured party,” the report said. In his responses to the law firm the former pope said he had no memory of the priest, no knowledge his conviction, and had not been informed of it by his successor.
The Vatican said in a statement that it would pay “appropriate attention” to the report, and reiterated the church’s “shame and remorse for abuses committed by clerics against minors.”
Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even before the release of Thursday’s investigation, the multicontinent abuse scandal had endured as a bruising part of Benedict’s legacy. During his tenure as pontiff, he dealt with an explosion of cases across the global church, in what amounted to Catholicism’s biggest crisis in decades.
He went farther than his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, in addressing the problems, defrocking hundreds of priests and meeting with clerical abuse victims in the United States — the first such meeting for a pope. But advocates saw his steps as insufficient, noting that he was slow to grasp the systemic nature of the clerics’ crimes and their coverup.
Most significantly, he did not mete out punishment against bishops who buried cases or transferred known abusers to new parishes. And he enacted few meaningful reforms to safeguard the church before stepping down in 2013, citing what he described as his “advanced age.”
Some church watchers note that Benedict, who spent his career defending the church against outside forces like secularism, helped to foster Vatican’s penchant for secrecy on abuse cases. Benedict has perhaps more direct knowledge of the crisis than any modern Catholic figure, because he presided over the Vatican’s powerful doctrinal department — which oversees abuse cases and punishment — before becoming pope.
The current archbishop of Munich and Freising is Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a close ally of Francis and one of the pope’s advisory council members. Marx last year offered to resign, saying he felt it necessary to “share the responsibility for the catastrophe of the sexual abuse by Church officials over the past decades,” which included institutional and systemic failure. But Francis rejected Marx’s request to step down, saying that he should instead continue as a “shepherd” and carry out reforms.
Marx had been scheduled to give a short statement on Thursday afternoon, but his office has since said it will give a fuller response next week.
“Due to the expected scope of the report, which covers the period from 1945 to 2019, it will take time to deal with the content,” it said.
Morris reported from Berlin. Vanessa Guinan-Bank in Berlin contributed to this report.
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