FILE – The chairman of the Catholic German Bishops Conference, Cardinal Georg Baetzing, speaks to the media in Bonn, Germany, Feb. 25, 2021. Top Vatican cardinals called for pause in the on the German Catholic Church’s controversial reform process during an unusual Vatican summit Friday, Nov. 18, 2022, fearing proposals concerning gays, women and sexual morals will split the church. Bishop Georg Baetzing, who heads the German bishops conference, explained the work undertaken so far, stressing that it was based on listening to the “people of God and the pain over abuses committed by clergy”.
By NICOLE WINFIELD
Top Vatican cardinals tried to put the brakes on the German Catholic Church’s controversial reform process Friday, fearing proposals concerning gays, women and sexual morals will split the church and insisting they would be better debated later.
The Vatican and the German bishops conference issued a joint statement after a week of meetings that culminated with an unusual summit between the 62 German bishops and top Vatican officials, including the No. 2 secretary of state, the head of the bishops’ office and the head of the doctrine office.
The pope, who met separately with the German bishops on his own on Thursday, was originally supposed to attend Friday’s summit but did not, leaving it to his cardinals to toe the Vatican line.
Germany’s church launched a reform process with the country’s influential lay group to respond to the clergy sexual abuse scandals, after a report in 2018 found at least 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014. The report found that the crimes were systematically covered up by church leaders and that there were structural problems in the way power was exercised that “favored sexual abuse of minors or made preventing it more difficult.”
Preliminary assemblies have already approved calls to allow blessings for same-sex couples, married priests and the ordination of women as deacons. One has also called for church labor law to be revised so that gay employees don’t face the risk of being fired.
The German “Synodal Path” has sparked fierce resistance inside Germany and beyond, primarily from conservatives opposed to opening any debate on such hot-button issues and warning that the German reforms, if ultimately approved in the final stage, could lead to schism.
Such warnings were echoed by Vatican Cardinals Marc Ouellet, in charge of bishops, and Cardinal Luis Ladaria, in charge of doctrine, in the meeting Friday.
According to the joint statement, they “spoke with frankness and clarity about the concerns and reservations of the methodology, content and proposals of the Synodal Path and proposed, for the sake of unity of the church,” that they be dealt with later, when the global Catholic Church takes up such issues in a universal way next year.
The statement said a “moratorium” was proposed, but was rejected.
Francis has since launched a global “synodal path” which involves soliciting input from lay Catholics around the globe that has echoed many of the same themes as the German process, including the role of women in the church and homosexuality. But there is no indication the global church is prepared to go as far as the German church in pressing for change.
Francis, for his part, has personally intervened on the German process and recently pointed to a 2019 letter he wrote to the German faithful as summarizing all he has to say on the matter. In that letter, Francis offered support for the process but warned church leaders against falling into the temptation of change for the sake of adaptation to particular groups or ideas.
Bishop Georg Baetzing, who heads the German bishops conference, for his part, explained the work undertaken so far, stressing that it was based on listening to the “people of God and the pain over abuses committed by clergy,” the statement said.
Baetzing is scheduled to give a press conference on Saturday.
Baltimore Catholic Archbishop William Lori greets parishioners after delivering Sunday Mass at Holy Family Catholic Church in July 2019, in Randallstown, Md.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore signaled Friday that it might object to a still-unreleased report by the Maryland attorney general into clergy sexual abuse of minors.
The report, by the office of outgoing Attorney General Brian E. Frosh, took nearly four years to complete and tallies more than 600 young victims and 158 abusive priests over 80 years, according to a court filing Thursday.
Because the 456-page report includes testimony that resulted from grand jury subpoenas, a judge must approve its release. The filing in Baltimore City Circuit Court requests its release.
Christian Kendzierski, a spokesman for the archdiocese led by Archbishop William E. Lori, wrote back Friday to The Washington Post’s asking if the church would contest the report’s release.
“The Archdiocese does not object to the release of a report which accurately details the heinous crime and sin of child sexual abuse perpetrated by members of the clergy and also fairly and accurately details how the Archdiocese responded to such allegations, even when the response fell far short of how such allegations are handled today,” his statement read. “The motion filed by the Maryland Attorney General does not reflect the Archdiocese’s current and decades-long strong pastoral response and handling of allegations of child sexual abuse.”
The report is the second of its kind, following an explosive one from a Pennsylvania grand jury in 2018 that led to the arrest of priests, early retirement for an archbishop and new policies. It also included many decades-old cases, something victims and their advocates said was essential since in most cases higher-ups were never held responsible and often priests retired and were still paid and remained clergy. Even if statutes of limitation made civil, canonical or criminal cases unfeasible, advocates said, the detailed compiling of how the cases happened and were handled, and the cost to the abused, was a kind of justice.
The archdiocese since January 2019 has cooperated with Frosh’s office, turning over more than 100,000 pages, the statement from the archdiocese’s spokesman said.
On Friday Kendzierski’s statement said the archdiocese would “continue to cooperate with any legal processes relating to the Attorney General’s investigation. The Archdiocese is participating in the court process and understands that the courts rightly expect the law on grand jury materials to be followed and due process to be respected.”
Requests to the archdiocese for greater clarity weren’t answered late Friday.
It wasn’t clear what legal argument the archdiocese might be planning to make. In Pennsylvania, church officials fought the attorney general over the inclusion of specific names of accused clergy who had not been charged, saying that to name them violates their constitutional rights. For weeks, court and state lawyers were in court arguing about the redacting of names and entire sections and what could be released.
Frosh spokeswoman Raquel Coombs said, “It is our hope that the Archdiocese will not oppose release of the report to provide victims long awaited relief and healing.”
— In court filing, attorney general’s office said there are “almost certainly hundreds more” and that church leaders failed to report many allegations or remove abusers
A nearly four-year investigation of the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore tallied more than 600 young victims of clergy sexual abuse over 80 years, a court filing by the Maryland attorney general said Thursday. The probe, the second in the country by a state prosecutor, after Pennsylvania’s, seeks to bring accountability and detail to cases long covered up or shrouded by statutes of limitation.
The filing by Attorney General Brian Frosh (D) comes in the 20th anniversary year of an investigative series by the Boston Globe that dug into the Catholic sexual abuse scandal in the United States. Major reforms and multibillion-dollar legal settlements have reduced the number of accusations over the decades, but advocates in and out of the church say that full restitution has never come and such chronicles are important.
“Now is the time for reckoning,” said the 35-page filing in Baltimore City Circuit Court that asks a judge to approve the release of the full 456-page report. Because the report includes information from grand jury testimony, a judge’s approval is required. “Publicly airing the transgressions of the Church is critical to holding people and institutions accountable and improving the way sexual abuse allegations are handled going forward,” the attorney general argued in the filing.
The filing says the report identifies victims from preschool to young adulthood. A spokesperson for Frosh said they reached to age 18.
It was not immediately clear Thursday how many of the priests and victims, if any, may have been newly uncovered by the report.
The filing says the report identifies 115 priests who have already been prosecuted or identified by the church as “credibly accused,” and that it includes an additional 43 priests “accused of sexual abuse but not identified publicly by the Archdiocese.” That is 158 priests.
The archdiocese lists 152 priests on its website as credibly accused.
Many dioceses have lists of credibly accused priests, and their systems for organizing the lists are different. They can include priests ordained in a diocese, or priests serving in a diocese when alleged abuses took place, or priests who happened to be in that diocese when abuse took place.
Christian Kendzierski, a spokesman for the archdiocese, wrote to The Washington Post that he has “no clarification” of what the filing meant by 43 new names. Raquel Coombs, Frosh’s spokeswoman, said she couldn’t comment beyond what was in the filing. The filing says that of the 43 priests that have not been publicly identified or prosecuted, 30 have died.
“The investigation also revealed that the Archdiocese failed to report many allegations of sexual abuse, conduct adequate investigations of alleged abuse, remove the abusers from the ministry or restrict their access to children. Instead, it went to great lengths to keep the abuse secret,” the filing says.One parish had 11 abusers over 40 years.
Earlier Thursday, a spokesman for the archdiocese said it has “fully cooperated” since Frosh began the investigation in January 2019, including providing more than 100,000 papers.
“The Archdiocese recognizes that the release of a report on child sexual abuse over many decades would undoubtedly be a source of renewed pain for survivors of abuse and their loved ones, as well as for faithful of the Archdiocese. The Archdiocese continues to offer its profound apologies to all who were harmed by a minister of the Church and assure them of our heartfelt prayers for their continued healing. The Archdiocese remains committed to pastoral outreach to those who have been harmed as well as to protect children in the future,” wrote Kendzierski in an email.“Any request the AG made of the Archdiocese, the Archdiocese has cooperated with and will continue to cooperate.”
David Lorenz, Maryland leader of SNAP, an organization that advocates for church abuse victims, said he was struggling to digest the scope of abuse and called the report “disturbing.”
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” he said, “and I just wish I could reach out to each of [the victims] and say: ‘It’s okay, it’s not your fault. Please seek help. There are people out there helping, who want to help, who will believe you, who won’t ridicule you, who won’t deny what happened to you. No matter how bad you think it is, it was never your fault.’ ”
Lorenz added that, despite his outrage, he doesn’t expect this report to land with the same effect that previous disclosures did, partly because people have been desensitized. “Nobody wants to look at this, it’s a horrible thing to look at,” he said. “I get that, but you’re not going to solve the problem until you look at it.”
Terry McKiernan, president of the watchdog and research group BishopAccountability.org, said that because the investigation is based on hundreds of thousands of pages of subpoenaed documents, the attorney general’s report has the potential to reopen a nationwide push for new laws and public accountability on how the church handled problem priests.
“It becomes a lot harder to ignore these issues when you have a 500-page report on how bad things are on your desk,” McKiernan said. “They’re going to have knowledge about failures in the archdiocese and management that we don’t know anything about yet,” he said of investigators. “The fact that they have uncovered … 11 accused priests over the years that worked in a single parish, that is shocking, and it’s the sort of thing we see when we approach full accountability at an archdiocese.”
A Pennsylvania grand jury made worldwide news in 2018 when it issued an 800-page report — a first of its kind — that led to arrests of priests in Michigan, protests in Maryland, an early retirement for a Washington archbishop and new policies from New York to the Vatican.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia passed laws extending or eliminating their statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse or allowing previous victims to sue, Marci Hamilton, who tracks legislation at the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Child USA, told The Post in 2019.<
Even before its release, the report spurred one Maryland lawmaker, Del. C.T. Wilson (D-Charles County), to draft legislation to help victims. Wilson had tried and failed for years to abolish the statute of limitations for abuse victims to file civil lawsuits against institutions that harbored their abusers. (There is no statute of limitations on criminal prosecutions, but Maryland limits how long victims abused as children have to file civil lawsuits.) In doing so, he and other victims of child sex abuse recounted their stories in testimony, only to see the legislation fail in the Maryland Senate after passing the House of Delegates.
He took a break from advocating for the bill last year. Then on Tuesday, he pre-filed legislation that would abolish time limits on civil suits as well as create a two-year window for victims previously barred from bringing such suits to take legal action.
“I didn’t plan on doing it again anytime soon,” Wilson said. “I knew the report was coming. The advocates thought it would be damning.”
correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the Maryland attorney general identified 157 priests who allegedly committed sexual abuse. The number is 158. The article has been updated.
French Catholic leaders initially played down clerical abuse, but the issue has now gone far beyond the ‘few bad apples’ stage.
Bishops and others kneel outside the Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire basilica in Lourdes, southwestern France, Nov. 6, 2021. France’s Catholic Church has paid financial compensation to 23 victims of child sexual abuse as the reparation process recently started, the body in charge of making the decisions said on Sept. 30, 2022. The Independent National Authority for Recognition and Reparation said that over 1,000 victims have come forward to claim reparation since the body has been set up earlier this year.
Like any modern Catholic official, Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of France’s Catholic bishops’ conference, realizes clergy sexual abuse is a systemic problem, one that calls for serious reform of the church’s uncertain rules and ingrained secrecy.
But recent revelations of sexual misconduct by a cardinal and a bishop on Moulins-Beaufort’s watch show how complicated, time-consuming and personal stamping out abuse can be.
These new cases, which come a year after a report that estimated that France had seen 330,000 ordained and lay abusers since 1950, have tangled Moulins-Beaufort in a web, caught between falling public confidence in the bishops’ ability to solve the problem — which only increases the pressure to act — and a pope who firmly condemns clerical sexual abuse but offers only vague guidance when faced with concrete cases.
The revelations last week, both involving popular and well-respected clerics, were bigger than any cases to date.
Bishop Michel Santier of Créteil, an eastern suburb of Paris, had a reputation as a prelate open to other faiths and to people sidelined in the church. In 2020, he took early retirement, citing health reasons, but it turned out he had admitted to Pope Francis in 2019 that he had made at least two young men do a striptease as part of a confession. Only after Santier later repeated his admission to his successor did the Vatican impose canonical restrictions on him.
The story finally came out in a Catholic magazine in October, forcing Moulins-Beaufort to acknowledge that he also knew the facts but could not publicize them because the Vatican hadn’t.
Three weeks later, Moulins-Beaufort read out a letter from Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who was twice elected head of the French bishops’ conference in the 2000s, confessed that he had “acted in a reprehensible way with a 14-year-old girl” 35 years ago.
From left, Monsignor Olivier Leborgne, bishop of Arras and vice president of the French bishops’ conference; Monsignor Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, archbishop of Reims and president of the French conference of bishops; and Monsignor Dominique Blanchet, bishop of Créteil, talk to reporters at the end of a news conference, in Rome, Dec. 13, 2021.
When Moulins-Beaufort unveiled the Ricard scandal, it came to light that several church leaders had been informed but had taken months to inform French law enforcement or the Vatican. Bishop Dominique Blanchet, who took over from Santier, later described how he tried to keep a distance from his popular predecessor without divulging the reason. “I was in an untenable position,” he said.
French Catholic leaders initially played down clerical abuse when news of U.S. cases made headlines in The Boston Globe two decades ago, but the issue has now gone far beyond the “few bad apples” stage.
“Neither ordination nor honors protect someone from making mistakes, including some legally serious ones,” a worn-down Moulins-Beaufort said at the end of the French bishops’ Nov. 3-8 plenary session in Lourdes. “Every person can be haunted by troubled forces that he does not always manage to control.”
Yet Santier’s and Ricard’s cases show that the problem is as much one of transparency as of troubled priests. “Your trust has been betrayed. You feel anger, sadness, amazement. These feelings are legitimate,” Rennes Archbishop Pierre d’Ornellas told parishioners in the Breton town of Montfort-sur-Meu.
D’Ornellas chose that parish because its pastor had just been jailed in Paris for yet another sexual abuse case. The Rev. Yannick Poligné, who is HIV-positive, was charged with aggravated rape, drug use and endangering the life of a 15-year-old male he met through the gay app Grindr.
Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, of France, arrives for a meeting at the Vatican, March 4, 2013. The prosecutor’s office in Marseille has opened a preliminary investigation of “aggravated sexual assault” against Ricard, one of France’s highest-ranking prelates of the Catholic Church. The investigation was opened Nov. 8, 2022, after a letter from an adviser of the current bishop of Nice.
At the news conference unveiling the Ricard scandal, Moulins-Beaufort said the total of French bishops involved in sexual abuse cases was now 11. But he mixed up the cases — for example, including those charged with nondenunciation of an abusive priest with prelates who actually abused victims — and thus created further distrust of the bishops in general.
Three bishops were not named, meaning more revelations may come soon. A church spokesman would only say that two were being investigated by French authorities and the Vatican, while the third had been reported to the French and restricted by the Vatican in his ministry.
The Rev. Hans Zollner, a Catholic expert on sexual abuse based in Rome, said: “The French bishops’ conference should communicate names, if this is legally possible. Without this, there is a risk of bringing widespread suspicion to bear on everyone. … This is a rule of communication that we have not yet learned.”
“How can we still believe that the church will get out of this, that it has the means to reform itself, when it is so deeply affected itself?” asked Isabelle de Gaulmyn, an editor and former Vatican correspondent for the Catholic daily newspaper La Croix.
“What do we see on the part of this ‘elite,’ supposedly chosen carefully by the pope and his advisers? Perversion for some — serious, profound and criminal perversion. And for the others, an incomprehensible laxity that leads to immense helplessness.”
On his plane back to Rome from a Middle East trip recently, Pope Francis acknowledged that the Vatican faces pushback in its efforts to overhaul the Catholic Church’s habits of denial, secrecy and coverup surrounding clerical sexual abuse. “There are people within the church who still do not see clearly,” he said, adding that “not everyone has courage.”
The pontiff’s delicate phrasing, and his timing, underscored the compounding damage the scandal has inflicted on the church’s moral authority and prestige. Days after Pope Francis shared those thoughts with journalists, new revelations of high-level sexual misconduct and coverup in France shattered illusions of progress by the church toward establishing a culture of transparency and accountability in its hierarchy.
That problem was crystallized in the admission by Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who was the archbishop of Bordeaux for 18 years before he retired in 2019, that he had behaved “in a reprehensible way” with a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago when he was a parish priest. The news was made more astonishing by the fact that Cardinal Ricard served as president of the Bishops’ Conference of France from 2001 to 2007, even as revelations of clerical sexual abuse rocked the church — first in Boston, then throughout dioceses in the United States and worldwide. Yet the prelate continued exercising his authority as one of the French church’s most prominent figures. He is now being investigated by French prosecutors in Marseille for “aggravated sexual assault.”
The cardinal’s public confession followed last month’s disclosure that another prelate, Michel Santier, 75, had been removed as bishop of Creteil, near Paris. The fact that he had been disciplined, after allegations that he had abused young adults decades ago, was overshadowed by the church’s silence on the matter. It had said nothing about the accusations or action taken against him until they were reported by the French media in October. He is now also under investigation by prosecutors.
Pope Francis has said there is no turning back from “irreversible” steps designed to enhance safeguards against clergy child sexual abuse and has said the church has adopted a “zero tolerance” policy toward offenders in the priesthood and the hierarchy. His push for reforms has featured broadening the church’s definition of sexual crimes, requiring nuns and priests to inform their superiors of abuse allegations, holding bishops and other prelates to account for their handling of instances of abuse, and empowering the Vatican’s own commission that deals with cases of sexual abuse, elevating its status and clout.
Yet the ongoing evidence of years-long silence in cases involving senior prelates and others in the hierarchy points to the internal institutional foot-dragging that Pope Francis acknowledged. So does the attitude of the church hierarchy in many poor countries, where the scandals of the past two decades are widely regarded as mainly a Northern Hemisphere problem, and little information has been made public about sexual abuse cases.
Pope Francis’s record is mixed on the greatest scandal to envelop the church in centuries. His forthrightness on the issue is admirable, but ultimately he, and the church, will be judged on the tangible progress they have made.
