German Catholic Church opens sexual abuse files, some back to end of WWII
Germany’s Roman Catholic Church will open its files to independent investigators into a sexual abuse crisis, allowing a search as far back as 1945, a bishop announced on Wednesday. Nine German dioceses will open records dating back to the end of World War Two while the 18 others will do so for the period 2000 to 2010, Bishop Stephan Ackermann said in Bonn.
“We want to track down the truth that may be lying undiscovered in the files of previous decades,” said Ackermann, the spokesman on abuse issues for the bishops’ conference. The two studies will provide “not only formal statistics, but also research into the causes (of abuse),” he told journalists, “so we can better understand how this monstrous sexual abuse by clerics and church employees came about.”
The German Church, one of the worst affected in a wave of abuse revelations that swept Europe last year, will use the studies to help hitherto undiscovered victims and improve prevention of future abuse, Ackermann said.
In Ireland, the latest of several government-sponsored reports said on Wednesday the Irish hierarchy continued to conceal cases of child molestation by priests even after it set abuse prevention guidelines in the 1990s.
Christian Pfeiffer of the Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute, which will conduct one study, said the nine dioceses examined back to 1945 should provide an adequate sample to determine if the child molestation cases, which were particularly frequent from the 1950s through the 1970s, had deeper roots.
The second study, conducted by a psychiatric institute at the University of Essen-Duisburg, will analyse the biographies and abusive behaviour of predator priests to identify possible risk factors to consider in prevention efforts.
German court fines SSPX Bishop Williamson for denying Holocaust
Ultra-traditionalist Catholic bishop Richard Williamson was fined 6,500 euros Monday by a German court for publicly denying the Holocaust in 2009, a court spokesman said. British-born Williamson, 71, who belongs to a controversial Catholic splinter group, the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), was appealing a 2010 fine of 10,000 euros for telling Swedish TV that no more than 300,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust.
He also denied in the interview the existence of gas chambers at Nazi concentration camps. Holocaust denial is a hate crime in Germany. Consensus among historians is that the Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.
Williamson’s statements became an embarrassment for the Vatican which readmitted him after a 22-year excommunication only days following the interview. In his 2010 book, Light of the World, Pope Benedict XVI said he would not have lifted the ban on Williamson if he had known of his far-right views, adding that the Vatican’s poor communications in the matter was a “total meltdown.”
German prosecutors demanded increasing the fine to 12,000 euros during the appeals process.
Read the full story by Kalina Oroschakoff here.
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I wonder if hitler would have readmitted the ghosts of 6 million Jews to life?
Yes sure, ugh
Benedict was born in 1928 and grew up in the nazi era. He learned his lessons well in their hitler youth core, even if he was drafted.
Just note that now that this issue has been exposed, we have all these complicated lies appearing.
The church will do anything to preserve its money and power. Its been reported that Williamson has about 600,000 neo nazi followers.
The church needs the money to pay off the victims of the endless hidden molestation of children.
Daniel-in-lion’s-den moment for new Catholic archbishop of free-wheeling Berlin
Like Daniel in the lion’s den, Berlin’s new Catholic archbishop met the media on Tuesday to face accusations he was homophobic and far too conservative for such a prominent post in the free-wheeling German capital. Rainer Maria Woelki, a surprise choice for the high-profile post, professed respect for gays, denied membership in the staunchly conservative Opus Dei group and said he did not come to Berlin to point a censuring finger at non-Catholics.
Berlin’s gay community and liberal media reacted with dismay to his appointment last week, saying the Cologne-based prelate was “backwards-minded” and the wrong man for the job. But interest in the new prelate was so strong that the Catholic Church, a minority of about 390,000 in a 3.5 million population mostly indifferent or hostile to religion, had to switch the news conference to a larger hall at the last minute to accomodate over 100 journalists who turned out.
“We will meet with each other,” Woelki, 54, said when asked about the city’s active gay community. “I have respect and esteem for all people independent of heritage, skin colour and individual nature. I am open to all without reservations.” Describing himself simply as Catholic, he denied being a member of Opus Dei despite having done his doctorate at the group’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. That part of his biography led to media reports over the weekend calling him “reactionary.”
“The Church is not a moral institution that goes around pointing its finger at people,” Woelki said. “The Church is for me a community of seekers and believers and the Church would like to help people find their hapiness in life.”
The left-wing daily Tageszeitung said it had expected the worst from Woelki’s premiere but concluded: “You can talk with the man of God. There will be a lot to talk about.” Berlin’s openly gay Mayor Klaus Wowereit seems to have eased the way for Woelki by warmly welcoming him to the city and promising to work closely with him. The two will host Pope Benedict when he visits the German capital in September.
During the last papal visit to Berlin in 1996, anarchists booed and streakers darted about in front of Pope John Paul’s popemobile as he made his way to the Brandenburg Gate.
Until his new assignment, Woelki was an auxiliary bishop in Cologne to Cardinal Joachim Meisner, an arch-conservative with close ties to German-born Pope Benedict. He was hardly known outside that western German city, where he was born. Woelki’s Opus Dei aademic credentials, link to Meisner and statements reaffirming the Church view that homosexual acts are sinful sparked off a storm in Berlin.
So we attack a person without even giving him a chance.Talk about intolerance from those who claim to be so tolerant of others!
What does he say that that Catholic Church hasn’t always taught?That sin is sin,be it adultery or homosexual acts.We were all given freewill by God so we can either try and follow His teachings or we can go our own way and see if we end up in hell.The choice is each individuals.But please don’t try and accuse this Bishop of “backward ways and intolerance”.The tone of this article and those contributing to it shows greater intolerance and backward ways!
I pray for the New Archbishop of Berlin.May he win many souls for Christ.
“If I were Pope Benedict, this is what I’d tell them in Berlin …”
Have you ever wanted to write a major speech for Pope Benedict to deliver? What would you say? How much leeway would you have if you were chosen to be the papal ghostwriter?
Benedict is not about to let outsiders write the landmark speech he will deliver to the German Bundestag in Berlin during his visit to his homeland on September 22-25. But the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS), a think-tank affiliated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), wants to test out this idea before he leaves Rome for the visit.
The KAS office in the Italian capital has just announced a contest called “Ghost writer for the pope!” This is not an invitation to write anything heretical. The announcement on its website says KAS will only consider entries that reflect Pope Benedict’s thinking “in theology, form and content.” It suggests that papal speechwriters in spe should use his address in London’s Westminster Hall last September as a model. Maximum length 5 pages, deadline August 26. The winner will be invited to hear the pope’s actual speech in the Bundestag on September 22.
“The choice will be made by a jury of KAS staffers in Rome, Catholic theology professors, journalists (Radio Vatican and L’Osservatore Romano) and religious dignitaries,” it warned. “The choice is not subject to appeal.”
One last condition — all entries must be submitted in German. We’ll keep an eye out for the results to report how innovative — or imitative — the winning text may be.
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Rosemary, I have no idea what happened to your initial post, which I did not see. We would not have rejected it for the reasons you allege, so I can only assume it got automatically rejected on some technicality. If you want to resend it, please do so and we’ll post it.
German minister urges local Muslims to help combat militancy
Germany’s interior minister urged the local Muslim community to join government efforts to combat radicalism among young Muslims, putting a special focus on the influence of militant websites.
“We want to stand up to the radicalisation and misuse of religion together,” Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said on Friday after talks with leaders of the Muslim community and security experts on how to prevent the spread of militancy. “All citizens of this country, no matter what our political tendency or religion, must take on the fight against radicalism and terror,” he told reporters.
Friedrich gave the example of a 21-year-old Kosovan man, brought up in Germany, who attacked a bus carrying U.S. military personnel at Frankfurt airport in March, killing two airmen. He said Arid Uka, who has been charged with murder by U.S. federal prosecutors, had become radicalised in Germany “not in the classical environment of a mosque or Muslim society but on the Internet”.
Germany’s political opposition said the conservative government risked casting suspicion on all Muslims. “If we want to isolate extremists who are prone to violence, we must support moderate Muslims and make them feel welcome in Germany,” said the centre-left Social Democrats’ parliamentary leader, Thomas Oppermann.
The head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, said extremists were a tiny minority: “We have over 2,500 mosques and there aren’t even a dozen fringe groups.” “We have to make it clear they are a small and dwindling group and that by talking about them and hyping them, we just strengthen them,” Mazyek told reporters. “That should not be the aim of a conference like this.”
via German minister urges Muslims to combat militancy.
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Erdogan urges Turks in Germany to integrate, not assimilate
Turkish immigrants in Germany should integrate into society but not assimilate to the point where they abandon their native culture, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on a visit to Germany on Sunday. Speaking to some 10,000 members of Germany’s large Turkish community in the wake of last year’s heated debate over the place of foreigners in the country, Erdogan took up the theme of integration amid what he sees as persistent European xenophobia.
“You must integrate, but I am against assimilation … no one may ignore the rights of minorities,” he said, adding that individuals should have the right to practice their own faith.
On Saturday, Erdogan threw an even sharper barb at German immigration policy, telling the Rheinische Post newspaper that forced integration requiring immigrants to suppress their culture and language was an affront to international law.
Immigration leapt to the forefront of political debate last year after central banker Thilo Sarrazin published a bestselling book that argued German culture was at risk from Muslims, who he said were a drain on state coffers. The debate left raw nerves on both sides as German politicians initially closed ranks to condemn Sarrazin’s theories, but later shifted tones rightwards as polls showed he enjoyed widespread support. Sarrazin later stepped down.
Erdogan’s newspaper comments were published alongside those of a senior German politician who complained of discrimination against Christians in Turkey. Conservative parliamentary floor leader Volker Kauder told the same paper that lands of a Christian monastery in Turkey known as Mor Gabriel were being expropriated, which he said showed that the Muslim country lacked religious freedom.
“I urge the EU to not open any more negotiation chapters with Turkey as long as Turkey does not guarantee full freedom of religion,” Kauder said.
Erdogan’s speech on Sunday comes ahead of a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel scheduled for Monday, where Turkey’s bid to join the European Union waslikely to come up. Turkish leaders have sounded increasingly impatient with lack of progress in entry talks that began in 2005, though they insist membership remains their top foreign policy goal. In his newspaper interview, Erdogan again derided what he described as European foot-dragging over the entry talks, saying he expected more German support for Turkey’s bid.
Germany opens first Reform synagogue since WW2
Germany opened its first new Reform synagogue since the Holocaust on Sunday, marking a major step in the revival of Reform Judaism, which traces its roots to the country. The synagogue in the northern city of Hameln was built on the foundation of its predecessor, which was destroyed by the Nazis during the “Kristallnacht” pogrom in 1938. The congregation received financial backing for the synagogue primarily from local and state government.
“It’s incredible that, after the Shoah, in Germany a synagogue could be built with money that came from German political organizations,” the congregation’s president Rachel Dohme told Reuters. The city’s reform congregation was founded in 1997 and has some 200 members, the majority of which are from the former Soviet Union.
Reform, or liberal, Judaism was pioneered in Germany by Israel Jacobson two centuries ago.
Read the full story by Eric Kelsey here.
Conservative German state bans burqas for civil servants
Hesse, a state run by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, on Wednesday became the first German region to ban Muslim face veils for public sector workers.
Hesse Interior Minister Boris Rhein announced it was “not acceptable” for the teacher in Frankfurt to wear a face veil because “public sector workers are obligated to have neutral religious and political views”.
The decision was prompted by a local teacher who had told her school she wanted to wear a burqa in the classroom after returning from maternity leave. She had not previously worn one.
Debates about outlawing burqas have spread across Europe after France banned the Muslim face veils.
Only a small minority of Muslim women in Europe cover their faces, but their veils have become symbols for Europeans troubled by problems such as the economic crisis, immigration and Muslim integration.
A poll last year showed 61 percent of Germans favoured a burqa ban. Ban supporters include a Catholic bishop in Bavaria, and also the country’s most prominent feminist, Alice Schwarzer. But Germany’s interior and justice ministers have opposed a ban.
Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim?
One of the most wrong-headed arguments in the debate about Muslims in Europe is the shrill “Eurabia” claim that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. Based on sleight-of-hand statistics, this scaremongering (as The Economist called it back in 2006) paints a picture of a triumphant Islam dominating a Europe that has lost its Christian roots and is blind to its looming cultural demise.
The Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or popularised the term with her 2005 book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” and this argument has become the background music to much exaggerated talk about Muslims in Europe. Some examples from recent weeks can be found here, here and here.
A good example is the video “Muslim Demographics,” an anonymous diatribe on YouTube that has racked up 12,680,220 views since being posted in March 2009. Among its many dramatic but unsupported claims are that France would become an “Islamic republic” by 2048 since the average French woman had 1.8 children while French Muslim women had 8.1 children — a wildly exaggerated number that it made no serious effort to document. It also predicted that Germany would turn into a “Muslim state” by 2050 and that “in only 15 years” the Dutch population would be half Muslim. “Some studies show that, at Islam’s current rate of growth, in five to seven years, it will be the dominant religion of the world,” the video declares as it urges viewers to “share the Gospel message in a changing world.”
The BBC produced its own video entitled “Welcome to Eurabia?” that gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the video’s claims. Watching “Muslim Demographics” and “Welcome to Eurabia?” back-to-back provides a useful lesson in the dark art of twisting statistics. The image at left, shows a fictional flag of “Eurabia” created by Oren Neu Dag.
Articles defending the “Eurabia” claim have often been so shrill that they essentially discredited themselves as serious arguments. But it could be difficult to find a solid statistics that gave an overall view of what was actually happening. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stepped up with an impressive study entitled “The Future of the Global Muslim Population” (here’s the press release, report and graphics here). As we summarised it in our report Muslim birth rate falls, slower population growth:
Falling birth rates will slow the world’s Muslim population growth over the next two decades, reducing it on average from 2.2 percent a year in 1990-2010 to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says.
Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030 compared to 1.6 billion in 2010, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared to 23.4 percent now, according to estimates by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life…
“The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries,” it said, noting the birth rate is falling as more Muslim women are educated, living standards rise and rural people move to cities.
The proven demographic fact that birth rates have been falling among Muslim women, both in Muslim majority countries and western countries where Muslims have migrated, is not new. Nor are articles debunking the idea that Muslims will become the majority in Europe (see here and here and here). But my own experience in discussing this with non-Muslims in Europe and the United States says this message does not seem to be getting through. The fact that Muslim birth rates, while still higher than those for non-Muslims, are actually falling seems to surprise people who do not follow these issues closely.
revel224: “to show the dastardly Europeans who colonized, plundered, looted, and murdered countless souls and treasures of 3rd world many of them Muslims, what happens when a shoe is on the other foot.”
Revel- you discredit your own statement here when you lump all of “Europe” together, when in fact it was a mere handful of European nations that were largely responsible for what you’re talking about. The British in particular, and the Dutch, French and Belgians to a far lesser extent, did indeed colonise large swathes of the Muslim world. But the vast majority of Europe did not. The Scandinavians, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Germans, Finns, Hungarians among others had absolutely nothing to do with colonisation of Muslim countries. Quite the opposite, as many of them were victims of corrupt Muslim colonisation thru e.g. the Ottoman Turks, who thrice failed to conquer Vienna and other vast regions.
In fact, the bulk of Europe largely avoided colonisation alltogether and weren’t involved in the dishonour of the slave trade. This is one reason that the Scandinavians and Germans have the most successful economies today- they have a culture that’s never relied on slave labour and thus has become adapted to doing its own manual labour and doing it well, hence their manufacturing prowess.
Ironically, this historical fact also seems to have a correspondence in the levels of Muslim settlement in the European countries that were colonisers. It’s very low in Scandinavia and Germany, which has only about 2 million Muslims (the vast majority of immigrants to Germany are east Europeans, Russians and ethnic Germans from North America, *not* Turks as often believed), somewhat higher in France and the Netherlands (not nearly as high as often claimed), but growing significantly only in Britain, which was indeed the major coloniser in the Muslim world. About 2.5-3 million Muslims reside in the UK, but that number is indeed growing quite quickly due to heavy immigration under both Labour and Tories to provide cheap Labour for businesses, and unlike Continent European countries, Britain has sharia law and courts in many districts as well as Islamic customs predominating there. See Tower Hamlets or Manchester for examples.
So the United Kingdom and England in particular are indeed taking on an increasingly Islamic character, along with a corrupt government whichever major party is leading it with a slavish devotion to the wishes of rich campaign donors (one reason why I and so many other Britons have left). But that’s not true of the rest of Europe. Don’t lump them together so.
Pope Benedict not fully welcome at German parliament next year
A rousing welcome in Berlin it may not be.
Pope Benedict’s invitation to address German parliament during his visit to his homeland next September 22-25 has not sat well with some members of the opposition. Volker Beck, the Green party floor leader, has protested that inviting a religious leader to address parliament, the Bundestag, is unprecedented and the wrong place to speak about religion.
“The German Bundestag is justifiably cautious when inviting a foreign head of state,” Beck told the German daily Die Welt. “Firstly the pope is the head of a religion and secondly the head of a state.”
Only foreign heads of state are invited to address the Bundestag. Earlier this year Israeli President Shimon Peres spoke to German parliament. Benedict is a head of state, so he fits the qualification, but Beck argued that he was first and foremost a religious leader and a head of state after that. He added that he didn’t know which other religious leaders would then need to be invited to address parliament in the interest of religious diversity if Benedict speaks.
Germany’s Christian Social Union — the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats — said that Beck’s opposition was simply opposition grandstanding. Bavaria, a Catholic stronghold, is also where the pope was raised and served as an archbishop in Munich.
More pressure, however, could come from outside groups, especially those opposed to the Vatican’s policies toward homosexuality. “The invitation for the pope to speak in the German parliament is completely incomprehensible,” Manfred Burns, the spokesman of the Lesbian and Gay Federation in Germany, said in a statement. “The Bundestag genuflects before a religious leader … who refuses to acknowledge our constitutional guarantees of equality and non-discrimination.”
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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THIS IS A WORLD WIDE PROBLEM IN EVERY INSTITUTION.
The percentage % of abuses is much higher in public schools,hospitals couples living together with kids from theirs previous relationships,and relatives.
if you have children beware of this places and people.
and with wide spread access to internet pornography the numbers are increasing everywhere.
you don’t believe me investigate government statistics.