A report released on Thursday found that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI failed to handle accusations of child abuse properly during his tenure as archbishop.
The German law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl said that Benedict, then called Joseph Ratzinger, failed to prevent the abuse of four minors between 1977 and 1982, when he served as archbishop of Munich. The report says that Benedict was aware of the abuse and failed to act on that knowledge to discipline the priests involved properly.
“In a total of four cases, we reached a consensus there was a failure to act,” attorney Martin Pusch said in the report.
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Two of the cases involved priests who were charged with child abuse under the former pope and continued working as pastors. The Catholic Church took no disciplinary actions against the priests, and no service or care was provided to the victims.
Benedict has denied his knowledge of said abuse cases, writing in 2013, “I can only, as you know, acknowledge [the cases] with profound consternation. But I never tried to cover up these things.”
The pope emeritus “takes the fates of the abuse victims very much to heart” and is fully “in favour of the publication of the Munich report”, a spokesperson for Benedict told German news outlet Bild.
The current archbishop of Munich has also been accused of failing to intervene in at least two cases of abuse, the report concludes.
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Westpfahl Spilker Wastl’s report alleged at least 497 cases of child abuse in the Munich diocese between 1945 and 2019, with most cases involving young men.
“The Holy See believes it has an obligation to give serious attention to the document” on cases of abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich but has not yet had a chance to study it, said Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office.
Benedict, now 94, was the first church leader to resign from the papacy in 600 years when he stepped down in 2013. Benedict has been accused of covering up cases of sexual abuse among Catholic leadership. When asked about the rise of pedophilia among Catholic priests in recent years, Benedict blamed it on the “absence of God” and the evolving notions of sexuality in the 1960s and ’70s.
