German Jesuit report shows years of sexual abuse cover-up
A Jesuit investigation has cited 205 allegations of sexual abuse against priests at its schools in Germany, revealing decades of systematic abuse and attempts of a cover-up by the prestigious Roman Catholic order. The new allegations threaten to further undermine the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, already accused of hushing up hundreds of sexual and physical abuse allegations in Church-run schools that have come to light recently.
“In the name of the order, I acknowledge with shame and guilt our failure,” Father Stefan Dartmann, Germany’s leading Jesuit official, said in a statement. “I ask for forgiveness.” The report also cited a further 50 allegations of abuse relating to other, mostly Catholic institutions.
The allegations by predominantly male victims in the Jesuit investigation focus on 12 priests, six of whom are now deceased, from several schools and youth facilities in Germany. Solitary victims cited a further 32 church figures.
Though allegations of abuse in Jesuit schools surfaced in January, Dartmann admitted that Father Klaus Mertes, director of the Canisius Kolleg high school in Berlin, informed him about the problem in 2006.
Can we expect Freudian slips when Benedict meets Irish bishops?
If there ever were a time for Pope Benedict to commit a Freudian slip that we could all understand, it would be in his meetings next week with Irish bishops to discuss the clerical sex abuse scandals that have shaken the Emerald Isle.
It’s not hard to imagine him meeting the Hibernian hierarchy behind closed Vatican doors and occasionally referring to the scandals “in Germany” rather than “in Ireland.” If he does, the Irish bishops will certainly forgive him. Enough has been happening in his fatherland recently to distract him from the uproar about the recent reports of clergy excesses in Ireland.
The controversy caused by two official Irish reports — the Ryan report on abuse in Catholic institutions country-wide and the Murphy report on the Dublin archdiocese — prompted the German pope to take the unusual step of calling the Irish bishops to Rome to discuss the ensuing crisis. He is due to issue a letter to Irish Catholics next Wednesday, after his consultations with the bishops. All this is quite exceptional for the Vatican, which usually does not get too involved in such cases in national churches. But it was arranged a few weeks ago when the problem seemed to be confined to the Irish Church
Since then, reports of hushed-up clerical abuse have been mounting in Benedict’s native Germany. These reports are all the more shocking because (1) few cases of clerical abuse have emerged in Germany and (2) the abuse allegedly occurred at elite Jesuit high schools in Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn and other cities. These boarding schools have excellent reputations in Germany, as do many Jesuit schools around the world, and charges like this disgrace a long and proud tradition of classical education that’s hard to find elsewhere these days.
Ouch… this cuts a bit close to home. One of my own sons boarded at one of these schools for a month when we lived in Germany — the goal was to improve his German language skills — and he returned with much improved Deutsch and an appreciation of Jesuit education. But he also came home with disturbing rumours of wayward priests.
There was widespread talk in Bonn back then — at least 15 years ago — about priests taking boys to nudist (Freikörperkultur) swimming pools. Neither we nor our friends who sent their boys to the school had any proof of misconduct, and our sons had no real complaints, but then again, we were not prosecutors investigating every single rumour either. Nor were the Jesuits, it seems, even though they were the ones we parents trusted our boys to …
This shamefully hidden past has come back to haunt German Catholicism in the same way that it has shaken the Catholic Church in the United States, Ireland, Poland and other countries. The irony is that in Germany, this has not hit the diocesan priests, often the usual suspects, but the priestly order that is supposed to be the intellectual elite of the Roman Catholic Church. Jesuit schools have such good reputations around the world that even Muslims, Jews and atheists — and I know cases of this personally in several countries — send their children to them to get the best education available in their cities. All parents I know who confided their children to Jesuit schools signed on to their intellectual rigour and most of them approved of the spiritual depth – but few knew about and none would have approved of such carnal exploitation. For most of us parents, this side of these schools came out only afterwards, in rumours and gossip that could not be verified but put a disturbing cloud of doubt over an otherwise positive experience.
What happend in Berlin and elsewhere 30 years ago is a disgrace. Especially since the Jesuits then were unable or unwilling to handle the problem with efficiency and professionalism.
What is different now, it seems to me, that the younger generation of Jesuits is determined not to repeat that mistake. I am impressed with their effort to bring light into the darkest corners of their collective past. If I have seen anything new in the Catholic Church in recent years, then it is this kind of unconditional openness and admission of guilt. In a strange twist of history, the German Jesuits could in their darkest hour since WWII, help their church to finally arrive in the 21st century.
Sexual abuse charges at Jesuit schools shock Germany
Germany’s leading Jesuit official has apologised for a growing number of sexual abuse cases at Jesuit high schools that have come to light recently. School officials there had failed to respond properly when they first heard of the allegations years ago, Father Stefan Dartmann, the head of Germany’s Jesuit order, said.
Dartmann said he knew of 25 former pupils who said they had been abused at presitgious Jesuit schools between 1975 and 1984 — 20 at the Canisius Kolleg in Berlin, 3 at the Hamburger St. Ansgar Schule in Hamburg and 2 at the Kolleg St. Blasien in St. Blasien in the Black Forest.
German media reported the first cases last week but the number of alleged victims has been growing and the possibility of a wider scandal looms. “I’m worried that a storm is going to break out now,” said the former director of Kolleg St. Blasien, Father Hans Joachim Martin.
Any scandal like this is big news, but it is even bigger in Germany because, in marked contrast to other countries like the United States and Ireland, little abuse is known to have taken place in Germany’s Roman Catholic Church.
Dartmann, who said the reports of abuse had been received by Germany’s Jesuit order as early as 1981, was quoted as saying he was ashamed nothing had been done. He admitted that Father Klaus Mertes, director of the Canisius Kolleg, had first informed him about the problem in 2006. “At the time, the victims asked for complete discretion,” he said in a statement. “Now that some victims have come forward, an investigation to uncover those cases of abuse fully is now possible and necessary.” He also apologised that those responsible at the time did not react in the way that was required.
Mertes raised the issue last week and has written to old pupils to find out the extent of alleged abuse after several people came forward to say they had suffered abuse in the 1970s and 1980s. He said there had been “hidden hints” about abuse as early as 1981, when former pupils wrote a letter criticising sex education at the school.
A long interview with Mertes has just appeared on the website of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel. He said he had heard rumours for about 15 years but never found any proof. A former pupil finally spoke with him about the charges four years ago, and much more information came out in conversations with others in December and January. Part of the reason for the silence about cases at Canisius Kolleg was the “myth” of the elite school that surrounded it, he said.
U.S. Jesuits honour ABC Williams with prize named after English martyr
Poor Rowan Williams. Only a few weeks ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican Communion was caught offguard by a Vatican offer of a new Roman home for Anglicans who cannot accept the idea of women bishops. At a joint news conference with London’s Catholic Archbishop Vincent Nichols, he did his ecumenical best to present this as a quite normal gesture among friendly Christian churches and not — as some media presented it — a Roman strategy to poach wandering sheep from the divided Anglican flock. It was proof of his sharp intellect and deep commitment to the ecumenical cause that Williams found a way to finesse this very trying situation.
Now another challenge has come not from across the Tiber, but across the Atlantic. The New York-based Jesuit weekly magazine America has just said it is “ proud to announce that The Most Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is the 2009 recipient of the Campion Award. The award is given on a regular basis to a noted Christian person of letters. It is named after St. Edmund Campion, S.J., who is patron of America’s communications ministry.”
What an award to give to the world’s top Anglican! As the press release explains about the man to whom the prize is dedicated, “a martyr of the English Reformation, Edmund Campion stirred Elizabethan England with his daring missionary efforts and the great power of his pen.” What it politely skates over is the fact that Campion was drawn and quartered for refusing to renounce his Catholic faith (see image below). For more about the Catholic view of Campion’s life, just click over to the Catholic Encyclopedia. The quick takeaway from all this is that the archbishop of the Church of England will be honoured with an award named after an English Jesuit martyred for his heroic struggle against — the Church of England!
Anyone who knows the magazine America and the American Jesuits who produce it know they mean this as a sincere appreciation of the archbishop and his tireless work for ecumenical and interfaith understanding. Williams will surely accept it with grace and wit, in the spirit in which it was offered. But while times have changed and relations between Catholics and Anglicans are vastly improved, it still seems a bit strange to present an Archbishop of Canterbury with an award named after Edmund Campion. But that’s the name of America magazine’s highest award, and we have to assume its award is sincerely meant. Maybe the ability to look beyond these limitations is at the heart of ecumenical understanding.
The America announcement notes helpfully that “the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England remember Campion in their calendars of saints.” All the better. Still, this will require quite some finessing. It will be interesting to see how Williams handles this in his acceptance speech. The award will be presented in New York on January 25, at the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
El Salvador honors Jesuit priests slain during civil war
(Photo: A painting commemorating six slain Jesuit priests,16 Nov 2009/Luis Galdamez)
El Salvador has honored six Jesuit priests killed by the army 20 years ago in one of the most notorious atrocities of the country’s long and vicious civil war.Leftist President Mauricio Funes, the first leader from a party of former Cold War rebels that fought in the conflict, granted the priests El Salvador’s highest honor posthumously in a ceremony on Monday.U.S.-backed soldiers shot the priests at their home at a local university on the night of Nov. 16, 1989, to silence their strong criticism of rights abuses committed by the army during the 12-year civil war that ended in 1992. Five of the priests were Spanish and one was Salvadorean.Read the whole story here. More on this at … Vatican Radio … BBC (photo essay) … Catholic News Service … Los Angeles Times … National Jesuit News.
from Africa News blog:
Oprah magic for Man of God
Nigerian author Uwem Akpan, who is a Jesuit priest, said he was "humbled" that his debut collection of short stories was chosen by influential U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey for her book club.
Oprah picked "Say You're One Of Them" as her 63rd book club selection, the first time she has chosen a book of short stories, saying these stories "left me stunned and profoundly moved."
The collection, published in 2008, includes five separate stories from the perspective of an African child that were described as capturing the resilience of children growing up in the face of unimaginable devastation.
Uwem Akpan, who runs a parish in Lagos, told Entertainment Weekly that he was "very, very humbled" to be chosen by Oprah.
He said he was not currently working on another book as his parish had been so busy but the church supports his writing with no conflict of interest between writing and being a priest.
"I have permission to write, but I do not need an imprimatur from the church -- that is more for people who are writing about theology and philosophy. They see that I am writing fiction and assume it is made up," he said.
"Don't forget that Jesus was a priest and a poet."
http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/Time_of_the_wr iter.htm
This is great news and I am very much looking forward to Fr Uwem Akpan’s appearance in Durban during our 13th Time of the Writer festival March 9-13 2010
Hope to see you there!!!!!!!!!
“The information was there” – Abp. Martin on Irish abuse report
Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has shown a refreshing frankness in talking about the widespread abuse of children in Catholic-run schools and orphanages documented in the Ryan report last week. In an op-ed page piece for the Irish Times today, he described himself as shocked but not totally surprised and recalled hearing about the abuse from victims up to 40 years ago. He refers to reporting by “a few courageous and isolated journalists like Michael Viney,” whose series on abuse appeared in the Irish Times in 1966.
“The stories they told then were not radically different from what the Ryan report presents, albeit in a systemic and objective way which reveals the horror in its integrity,” he wrote. “Anyone who had contact with ex-residents of Irish industrial schools at that time knew that what those schools were offering was, to put it mildly, poor-quality childcare by the standards of the time. The information was there.”
The official Church reaction in Ireland has been shame and apologies all around, starting with Cardinal Sean Brady. It included apologies from the Christian Brothers, a teaching order with a reputation for stern discipline and abuse charges that won a lawsuit to bar the report from naming abusers. These were certainly appropriate. What was missing, though, was the admission that the problem was well known, even if all the details were not. There was even a film made about one of these schools, The Magdelene Sisters, that won the Golden Lion at the 2002 Biennale Venice Film Festival.
Irish novelist John Banville tackled this in an op-ed piece for the New York Times on Friday:
Everyone knew. When the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued its report this week, after nine years of investigation, the Irish collectively threw up their hands in horror, asking that question we have heard so often, from so many parts of the world, throughout the past century: How could it happen?
Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930 until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew…
Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.
We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.
Irish Jesuit blogger Fergus O’Donoghue disputes Banville’s description of Ireland as a “closed state … ruled… by an all-powerful Catholic Church.” That was not factually the case, of course, but the Catholic Church certainly did enjoy great influence for much of that period. And many lay people accepted the Church’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to issues like this.
The devil is being kept very busy by the Catholic church. We have a pope in Rome who covered up the child sex abuse for his predecessor and still the sheeple flock to see him! Buggers belief!
The pope and the Holocaust: Regensburg redux?
The uproar over traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust highlights an open secret here in Rome: Vatican departments don’t talk to each much, or at least as much as they should. The pope appears to have decided to lift the 1988 excommunication of four schismatic bishops of the SSPX (including Williamson) without the wide consultation that it may have merited. The Christian Unity department, which also oversees relations with Jews, was apparently kept out of the loop. The head of the office, Cardinal Walter Kasper, told The New York Times it was the pope’s decision. Kasper’s office and the Vatican press office, headed by Father Federico Lombardi, were clearly not prepared for the media onslaught that followed the discovery of Williamson’s views denying the Holocaust.
Pope Benedict’s lifting of the ban and Williamson’s comments about the Holocaust are unrelated as far as Church law is concerned. The excommunications lifted last Saturday were imposed because the four were ordained without Vatican permission. As Father Thomas Resse, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told me: “The Holocaust is a matter of history, not faith. Being a Holocaust denier is stupid but not against the faith. Being anti-Semitic, however, is a sin.” This is an important distinction, but not one the Vatican seems to be able to get across.
It was all very reminiscent of the pope’s Regensburg speech in 2006. Few in the Vatican knew it was coming. The Vatican was overwhelmed by the Muslim reaction and the media interest. This time, it is also not clear how many people in the Vatican even knew about Williamson’s history. Surely, those negotiating with the traditionalists for the lifting of the excommunications should have known. If they didn’t, why didn’t they? If they did, why did they not tell Kasper’s department? The Holocaust is such a sensitive issue for Jews that this response could have been seen from miles away.
Even if the Vatican felt the rapprochement with the traditionalists was necessary, a clear and severe distancing from Williamson’s views issued simultaneously to the announcement of the lifting of the excommunications certainly would not have hurt.
It is still too early to gauge the public relations fallout within the Jewish community and in the Church itself. In all the years I have been covering Catholic-Jewish relations, this is the biggest blow-up I can recall — bigger than the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, the Good Friday prayer, the controversy over Pius XII or the late Pope John Paul receiving Arafat. It will take a long time for this one to heal. Those involved in Catholic-Jewish dialogue say it will go on. It will.
In 2003, several Reuters correspondents — including myself — published a book entitled “Pope John Paul, Reaching Out Across Borders.” One contributor, Alan Elsner, is Jewish and lost relatives in the Belzec death camp in Poland in 1942. He concluded his chapter on Catholic relations with Jews with this paragraph:
“For the Jews, the central question to be put to Christians remains, in the words of Rabbi Michael Signer ‘Can we trust you, can we trust you now?’ For Pope John Paul, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’. It will be for his successor to provide an answer for the future.”
Gee Pullella – after you stupid piece beginning with a total lie “Pope Benedict rehabilitated Saturday a traditionalist bishop” why would we believe anything you write. “Rehabilitated”? From a supposed veteran Rome correspondent who could perhaps be expected to know a few basics about Catholic polity given, you know, Vatican, Rome and all?One can criticise the abysmal Vatican PR machine but then it is a church not a media outlet.Reuters however is fast becoming a laughing stock for its ridiculous and often downright mendacious religion reporting. And with good reason.
“In retrospect, I wish Pius XII hadn’t been so diplomatic”
The role of Pope Pius XII during World War Two is a subject of endless dispute, part of which we’ve tracked on FaithWorld over the past year. This has gained in interest because of Vatican plans to put him on the path to sainthood, which may be held up now because of protests from Jewish groups. We’re all waiting for the secret archives of his papacy (1939-1958) to be opened to finally see what the documents say about his relations with Nazi Germany. While we’re waiting, one of the key questions that could be assessed on the basis of files already available is what Pius thought about dealing with the Nazis before he became pope. There is a long paper trail there, because Pius was the Vatican Secretary of State — effectively, the prime minister of the Vatican — from 1930 until his election as pope. But a lot of people argue for or against Pius without having read this material.
Gerard Fogarty S.J., a University of Virginia historian and Jesuit priest, has worked through much of this material and come up with a fascinating article in the U.S. Jesuit magazine America. He’s examined much of the paper trail the future pope left in the 1930s but many of the documents are in a language that the leading commentators on Pius don’t speak. We’re not talking about that dead language Latin, but Italian — a lively regional tongue in Europe that happens to be an international language within the world’s largest church, Roman Catholicism.
“This is one of the problems even now,” Fogarty recounted in an informative podcast for America. “Scholars come to me and ask, do you use a translator? No scholar is going to do that. You’ve got to learn the language yourself. So people have not looked at what was published.”
Fogarty has scoured archives in the United States, Britain, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Vatican City for all the information he can find about Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli — the future Pius XII — and the Nazis in the 1930s. He has also pushed the Vatican to publish documents from the Pius XII papacy in stages, so we can get the files from the war years soon, but come up against the reflexes of a bureaucracy that goes back two millennia. “Some people in the archives opening up just a segment because they want to open it pontificate by pontificate,” he said. Publishing the war documents once the archivists have sorted material until 1945 could give us this information earlier, “but they want to go up to 1958.”
After reading what’s available now, Fogarty thinks Pius XII did the best he could given his understanding — from long diplomatic experience with Germany and advice given by, among others, members of the German resistance — that open protest against the Nazis was counterproductive.
“In retrospect, I wish he hadn’t been so diplomatic,” he said. “If you made me pope, which is not going to happen, i would think as an historian. He was a trained diplomat.”
with all due respect to the scholar his interpretation of the pope’s motives vis a vis the jews appears to me to be apologetic and slanted, not critical and dispassionate. so yes i can still say that the pope was not saintly when it came to his duty to speak out. does that make him pro-german or anti-semitic? let’s just say it does not make him anti-german or pro-semitic – and given the resulting mass murder, it makes him complicit. there just is no other way to read the historical record with any honesty.
First it was about Pius’s silence, now it’s Benedict’s
The dispute over Pope Pius XII’s public silence about the Holocaust (background here) widened over the weekend. At the same time, Pope Benedict came in for criticism for his own silence, this time about organised crime in the Naples area during a visit to nearby Pompei . A local newspaper had (wrongly) reported he would publicly condemn the Camorra, as the local mafia is known. His spokesman insisted the visit to a Marian shrine (the purpose of the trip) was purely spiritual.
The Pius dispute heated up when Rev. Peter Gumpel, the German Jesuit who is the postulator for the late pope’s cause for sainthood, told the Italian news agency ANSA on Saturday that Benedict was delaying the beatification of Pius because it would harm relations with Jews. He also said Benedict could not visit Israel until a caption under a photograph of Pius at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial was changed. The caption said Pius “abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews”. The Vatican denies that charge and says Pius did all he could to save Jews.
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi denied the caption was holding up any papal visit to Israel. Without naming them, he also told both Gumpel and Pius’s critics to lay off Benedict. “In this situation, it is not opportune to exercise pressure on him from one side or the other,” he said.
The latest twist to this came on Monday when a photograph of Benedict emblazoned with a superimposed Nazi swastika appeared on an Israeli website run by self-proclaimed supporters of the governing Kadima party. It was later removed after a request from Kadima’s leader, Israel’s foreign minister and possibly soon its prime minister, Tzipi Livni. Before it was swapped for a picture of a smiling Benedict overlooking a crowd-filled St. Peter’s Square, a Kadima spokesman said: “Tzipi Livni strongly condemns this and we are working to remove this shameful picture.”
There is no link between the Pius story and Benedict’s non-condemnation of the Camorra, but several Italian papers like La Stampa, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera played the issue prominently. This prompted Il Giornale‘s Vatican correspondent Andrea Tornielli, a prominent Pius defender, to complain the press was now talking about “the ‘silence’ of Papa Ratzinger.” “I think that Benedict should be free to make a Marian pilgrimage without being obliged to speak publicly about all the social scourges of the area that hosts him,” he wrote.
We’ve said here that the polemics were sure to continue because of two meetings at the Vatican in coming weeks. The New York Jewish weekly Forward has now added two more occasions for further sparks to fly:
The Jewish umbrella group in charge of official relations with the Holy See is planning to raise the issue during a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI later this month. The issue also is likely to be broached at a high-level biennial Jewish-Vatican meeting in mid-November in Budapest.
Abraham Foxman, the national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, called on the body, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), to “take a strong stand” in insisting that the Vatican fulfil its promise to open its wartime archives to independent scholars.
Name any other organization or group that has to have a FULL TIME “department” running interference for it. When the entire world has a problem with you, perhaps you should do some self-examination. Maybe calling everybody who is not in your group names is not a good idea (GOYIM, GENTILE, SHISHKA). Maybe claiming to be “superior” to everyone else is a bad idea. Maybe refusing to assimilate and associate with your neighbors is dumb. You have the right to do what you want, but do not WHINE (which is another irritant) when People fine you OBJECTIONABLE. Did it NEVER occur to you that being anti-GENTILE might be the cause of anti-semitism? There was NO anti-semitism in the world until you came along with the Old-Testament and CREATED IT!
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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Not only do Jesuits abuse small children, a Jesuit abused another Jesuit. California Jesuit Charles Connor abused Jesuit James Chevedden while Chevedden was recovering from an operation. Connor and a band of other Jesuits cost the Jesuit Order $7 million to settle an unrelated sex abuse case regarding disabled men. Connor’s friend, Jesuit Jerold Lindner with $2 million in sex abuse settlements on his record, was the last Jesuit to see Chevedden alive. Thomas Smolich was the Jesuit California Provincial at the time of Chevedden’s death.