Benedict, Sexual Abuse and his Handlers

 The NY Times story:

Retired Pope Asks Forgiveness Over Handling of Abuse Cases

ROME — Two weeks after a report found that retired Pope Benedict XVI had mishandled four cases involving the sexual abuse of minors while he was an archbishop in Germany decades ago, he acknowledged on Tuesday that “abuses and errors” had taken place under his watch but denied any misconduct.

Greater detail about the response of Benedict and his aides are provided by this article in America

Pope Benedict asks for forgiveness in a ‘confession’ responding to Munich sex abuse report

Benedict, like most bishops of his time, made many mistakes in dealing with sexual abuse. If I had the time, information is out there that could argue that he was ahead of others in recognizing and dealing with the problem especially as CDF head and then Pope. His record of awakening to the problem is probably better than that of Francis who took a long while to get around to his present forceful stance. I think Francis was helped by recognizing the large role that clericalism has played in the sexual abuse scandal. I doubt that Benedict is very concerned about clericalism.

Benedict's poor showing in response to everything going on in Germany about sexual abuse is very likely due to his handlers. This interview with Father Hans Zollner in America makes a great case for that, namely that Benedict's "official response" is very inconsistent with his own thinking on many issues.

Father Hans Zollner on the German sex abuse report, Pope Benedict and the future of the church

Zollner overall views are very interesting

I began by asking Father Zollner if he thinks the greatest damage to the church came from the fact that Benedict was identified as one who mishandled abuse cases. His answer was striking: “While most attention has been drawn to this, the biggest damage to the church, the most shocking fact, is that none—not a single one, conservative or liberal—of the archbishops of the Munich-Freising archdiocese from 1945 to 2019 has done consistently what he should have done in dealing with cases of abuse.” On the other hand, “they were more consistent with lay people than with priests: when a lay person was accused, they removed him from service in the church, but not the priest.”

I noted that from the beginning of the abuse scandal putting the institution before the victim has been identified as one of the major problems. While Father Zollner agreed, he added: “It was a case of the inner circle, the in-house club,:‘We solve the problem among ourselves.’” Instead, he said, “dealing with the abuse problem calls for a sharing of power, for inclusion of experts, for independent audits. We have the latter in some parts of the world today, but we need it also for personnel strategy, for communication and so on. This is a call for the church to open up and not to remain in a fortress mentality.”

When I remarked that the synodal process started by Pope Francis aims to achieve this, Father Zollner said, “Yes, it combines well.” But, he added, the core challenge “is the relationship between the church and the world,” an issue that “Vatican II began to address, but we didn’t follow through on this, and so a 19th century defensive mentality still prevails, as Cardinal Martini noted when he said the church was 200 years behind the times.”

From his experience over the years Father Zollner said he has come to understand that “in the abuse and its cover-up you see life in ‘brennpunkt’ [the German word means ‘focus’]; you see the big questions concentrated there—sex, money, power, leadership, relationships, relationship to the state, to outside experts and to the media, and therefore our work in our Safeguarding Institute is not only about sex abuse, it is also about structure, systemic [abuse], accountability, transparency, and much else.” In other words, “the abuse and all its mishandling could be considered as a microcosm of the challenges facing the church today.”

On Benedict:

It was good, in principle, that Benedict showed a willingness to cooperate. It showed he took it seriously.”

Benedict XVI “is lucid” and “has a very good long-term memory,” as people who visited him over Christmas told Father Zollner, and he put his signature to the 82 pages of responses that were sent to the law firm around Dec. 15 or 16, thereby taking responsibility for them. The Vatican was not involved in preparing or approving the responses, and Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, was only informed about it around Christmas Day.

After reading both the questions and the emeritus pope’s responses, Father Zollner, like many others, concluded that Benedict’s advisors had not served him well. He identified various problems with the 82-page response, besides the fact that it is obvious that the response was not written by Benedict. This was immediately evident, as it was written in a different style of German than Benedict ordinarily uses.

Father Zollner said the first problem relates to the fact that Benedict in his response said that as archbishop of Munich (1977-82) he was influenced by “the zeitgeist” of that time—whereas hitherto he had always insisted that as Christians we should not be influenced by the zeitgeist because we have moral values and standards that are independent of it. Furthermore, in an April 2019 article, Pope Benedict accused the zeitgeist of the 1960s for the abuse scandals in the church.

A third problem is that Benedict’s response says the bishop is not responsible for a priest who abuses “in private,” meaning when he is not wearing clerical attire and cannot be recognized as a priest. Father Zollner asked whether this means that priesthood is related to clerical attire. Moreover, this response reveals an “inconsistency” with Benedict’s own theology and indeed with the theology of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Because of this, Father Zollner said, “It is certainly not from him, even though he signed it.”

Pointing to a fourth problem, Father Zollner said he found it “astounding” that although Archbishop Gänswein and the lawyers assisting Benedict had received the relevant background documentation, including the minutes of the Jan. 15, 1980 meeting that showed that Cardinal Ratzinger had participated in the gathering where they discussed the Essen diocese’s request to allow an abuser, Father Peter, Hullerman to come to Munich for psychotherapy. Nevertheless Benedict, in his response, “stated on three different occasions that he was not present.” After the publication of the report, however, Benedict “had to backtrack and admit he was present” but attributed the mistake to “an error in editing.