Munich abuse report: Cities in Bavaria are preparing for mass church exits

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Towers of the Munich Frauenkirche: Hundreds of appointments for leaving the church have been booked in the city in the past few days

Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa

After the presentation of a report on sexual violence against children and young people in the Catholic Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, registry offices in Bavaria have to prepare for a flood of church exits.

According to the district administration department (KVR), around 650 appointments for people to leave the church have been booked in Munich alone since the report was published last Thursday.

That was significantly more than twice as many as would normally have been expected, said a KVR spokesman.

In order to cope with this flood, the registry office is therefore extending its opening hours and employing two additional employees for people leaving the church.

All in all, the capacity will even be tripled “through redeployment”, but even that will probably not be enough.

The KVR therefore points out that leaving the church can also be submitted in writing – if the signature is notarized.

»Create additional appointment capacities«

The cities of Regensburg, Ingolstadt and Würzburg are also reacting and expanding their capacities.

In Würzburg, 22 additional appointments per week are to be offered from February 1st.

Since Thursday, 50 requests have been received there about leaving the church - five times as many as in the same period of 2021. A total of 109 people left the church there this year.

70 of them were Catholic.

In Ingolstadt, all dates for leaving the church are fully booked until mid-March.

However, the demand is so great that "the registry office will foreseeably create additional appointment capacities," as a spokesman said.

In Regensburg, the registry office wants to “expand the range of appointments” from February.

Not far from Munich, in Ebersberg, the number of resignations almost doubled in the first few weeks of the year: by January 26, 2021 there were 17; this year, according to the city, there are already 31. The district court there had Convicted a priest of sexual abuse in the late 1980s before he was reinstated in another parish and reoffended there again.

According to a city spokesman, 21 people have left the church in Bamberg since January 21, the day after the study was presented, 17 of them Catholics.

In total, there have already been 83 exits there in January 2022, 71 of them Catholic.

"This is also significantly more than in previous years," said the spokesman.

In Nuremberg, appointments must be booked two weeks in advance.

Anyone leaving the church there this week has booked the appointment before the report is presented.

So far this year, the total number of Catholics and Protestants leaving the church there has already reached 371. That is 73 percent more than last year as of January 25.

The report by the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW), commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising itself, comes to the conclusion that cases of sexual abuse in the diocese have not been dealt with appropriately for decades.

It accuses the cardinals and former archbishops Friedrich Wetter and Joseph Ratzinger as well as the current one, Reinhard Marx, of misconduct.

The experts speak of at least 497 victims and 235 suspected perpetrators, but assume a significantly larger number of unreported cases.

wit/dpa