Retired Pope Benedict XVI Asks for Forgiveness Over Handling of Sex-Abuse Cases

An accompanying document from his legal professionals rebutted particular charges of coverup, perjury and insensitivity to abuse victims made against the 94-calendar year-outdated Benedict previous thirty day period in a church-sponsored probe on historical sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising. The probe faulted the then-archbishop in various circumstances for failing to examine, discipline or take away abusive monks.

Benedict’s lawyers mentioned that in none of the instances in concern did the upcoming pope know that the clergymen ended up even suspected of sexual abuse. His lawyers also explained that an mistake in his prepared responses to the Munich investigators, which led to accusations of inaccurate testimony, was owing to a “transcription error.”

Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks abuse conditions close to the globe, explained Benedict’s reaction as “a deep disappointment and skipped opportunity.”

“The previous pope experienced the prospect to do one thing brave and history-switching now. He could have come to be the initial pope to admit to deliberate coverup and enabling of sexual abuse. By so doing, he would have set an example of radical truth-telling for other church leaders, which include

Pope Francis

himself,” Ms. Barrett Doyle mentioned.

The Vatican, exactly where the retired pope life, didn’t right away answer to a request for remark on Tuesday.

The controversy has still left a shadow on Benedict’s legacy of fighting sexual abuse, which was a person of the signature results in of his occupation as a cardinal and pope immediately after he remaining Munich for the Vatican.

For much more than two decades ahead of his election as pope in 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the Vatican’s anti-abuse czar. In that purpose, he pushed

St. John Paul II

to improve the church’s response to the challenge, centralizing prosecution of clerical abuse scenarios at the Vatican and enhancing penalties to contain defrocking, or dismissal from the priesthood.

As pope, Benedict extended the statute of limits for abuse of minors and Vatican judges all through his pontificate barely at any time lowered the sentences of defrocked abusers on charm.

By distinction with John Paul, who never met with abuse victims, Benedict fulfilled many times with groups of victims all through his travels, such as to the U.S. in 2008.

Even in retirement, he referred to as for extra rigor in prosecuting conditions of clerical sexual intercourse abuse by church authorities.

“An overemphasis on the legal rights of the accused has at times designed it basically impossible to convict abusers and that mentality stays widespread,” he wrote in an essay published in 2019. The same essay stirred controversy by suggesting that much of the blame for the church’s abuse disaster lay with the sexual revolution in wider Western society.

But the blot on Benedict’s status stems from his time as Munich archbishop concerning 1977 and 1982.

“A tranquil evaluation of his time in Munich exhibits that he could have and really should have manufactured the oversight of priests his priority and scaled back again on other engagements. Dependent on flawed judgment, he trusted fellow priests who allow him down, and who coated up abuse and enabled abuse,” said Ulrich Lehner, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Mr. Lehner claimed that Cardinal Ratzinger acquired from his mistakes and, as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal place of work, “he did not delegate, but tackled the trouble, even against substantial resistance from the pope and other cardinals.”

The Munich probe isn’t the very first time that Benedict has stood accused of mishandling instances of abuse. Just one of the circumstances in problem was reported all through Benedict’s pontificate, in 2010. At the time, the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising claimed that his then-best adviser had taken entire responsibility for reinstating a priest with a record of abuse to ministry in 1980.

Clerical sexual abuse has continued to haunt the leadership of the church in excess of the dozen of years given that, together with in in depth historical scientific studies of the challenge in Germany, France and the U.S.

In 2020, a Vatican report confirmed that 3 successive popes, together with Benedict, experienced failed to self-control the U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick even with popular experiences of his sexual misconduct. Mr. McCarrick, who has denied wrongdoing, became the initially cardinal in modern occasions to be eradicated from the priesthood in 2019, just after a Vatican court docket found him responsible of sexual abuse of minors and sexual misconduct with grown ups.

Compose to Francis X. Rocca at [email protected]