Cardinal Marx at a press conference in Munich last week.LENNART PREISS / AFP
Pope Francis does not accept the resignation of the Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who was presented to him at the end of May as a way of assuming his share of responsibility for the sexual abuse of minors by some members of the German Church.
In a letter released by the Vatican, Francis admits that "the whole Church is in crisis" because of the abuses and that he cannot move forward without acknowledging it.
"The ostrich policy does not lead to anything, and the crisis has to be assumed from our paschal faith," says the letter, published in Spanish and with Argentine idioms, which indicates that the Pope has personally taken care of writing it and is not a mere bureaucratic procedure.
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It is common for resigners to write letters and also for Francis to reject them, but it is unusual for these to be made public, as happened last week with Marx's and now with the Pontiff's. Marx, 67, is a pillar of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, not only in Germany, where he is one of the country's best-known bishops - he chaired the Bishops' Conference (DBK, in its German acronym) until last year - but also in Rome, because he directly advises the Pope as a member of the cardinal commission. He is considered a representative of the progressive wing. His resignation, which he argued as a way to foster a new beginning, shook the Catholic Church. Marx is not directly accused of having known abuses or of hiding them.
“Dear brother, first of all thank you for your courage.
It is a Christian courage that does not fear the cross, it does not fear to be overwhelmed by the tremendous reality of sin ", the Pontiff begins the letter.
Marx acknowledged in his resignation letter the "institutional failure" of his archdiocese in dealing with the sexual abuse scandal.
"In essence, it is about sharing responsibility by members of the Church in recent decades," he told the Pope, admitting that there had been "institutional or systemic failures", in addition to personal ones.
A large investigation in 2018 revealed that at least 3,677 children and adolescents had been abused by 1,670 perpetrators, members of the German Catholic Church, in a period of almost sixty years, between 1946 and 2014.
A Church in "standstill"
Marx said in his letter that the Catholic Church is at "a stalemate." The Pontiff does not refer to this expression literally, but he agrees with the diagnosis and uses the same word as Marx, "catastrophe", to refer to the "sad history of sexual abuse and the way of dealing with it that the Church took until recently. weather". "Assuming the crisis, personally and communally, is the only fruitful path because a crisis does not come out alone but in the community and we must also take into account that a crisis comes out better or worse, but never the same," says Francisco, that urges "to air this reality of the abuses and of how the Church proceeded."
“He blames me in front of so many historical errors of the past, we have done it more than once in many situations, although we personally have not participated in that historical situation. And this same attitude is the one that is being asked of us today ”, says the Pontiff, who adds that although“ historical situations have to be interpreted with the hermeneutics of the time in which they happened ”, this does not exempt us from assuming them“ as a history of sin. that besieges us ”. "In my opinion, each Bishop of the Church must assume it and ask himself what should I do in the face of this catastrophe?"
At the end of the letter the Pontiff asks Marx to continue as Archbishop of Munich and Freising and reminds him that Jesus did not accept Peter's resignation either: “If you are tempted to think that, by confirming your mission and not accepting your resignation, this Bishop of Rome (your brother who loves you) does not understand you, think about what Peter felt before the Lord when, in his own way, he presented his resignation: "Get away from me, I'm a sinner", and hear the answer: "Shepherd my sheep."
