Enlarge image
Numerous punishable and non-punishable sexually motivated breaches of duty by clerics have been concealed, covered up, overlooked and not sanctioned in the Catholic Church.
Photo: Christian Ohde / IMAGO
appraisal
The world is shaken.
A law firm from Munich has revealed that between 1945 and 2019 there was sexual abuse of around 490 victims by around 240 Catholic clergy in the district of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.
Whether the people counted as such in the report were all perpetrators or just suspects, and whether all the victims were actually such, is not known, as is almost always the case, because the office of the investigators is not made up of clairvoyants and not even public prosecutors.
Unfortunately, 50-year-old crime allegations against the deceased cannot be completely cleared up, even with the greatest determination.
But one can make an effort: In the "Recommendations" chapter, the experts hopefully list: "Formation of an expert pool".
There is certainly nothing wrong with lawyers providing legal opinions.
The German Lawyers' Association does not yet have a specialization as a "specialist lawyer for dealing with abuse";
so basically anyone can do it.
It is important, of course, that the investigation is “independent”.
According to some, this is guaranteed by the fact that, according to § 1 of the Federal Lawyers' Act (BRAO), the lawyer is an independent organ of the administration of justice.
Clients and other persons subject to the law usually see things differently and are supported by § 43a BRAO (»The lawyer may not represent conflicting interests«) and § 356 StGB (»Party council«): Lawyers represent interests.
The Catholic Church, a public corporation, seems miraculously different.
On February 3, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the superior of the Munich and Freising clergy sharply reprimanded those subordinates who dared to be cumbersome to the private tribunal he had ordered at the expense of the diocese.
As a punishment, he ordered, his defense speech must also be held in public.
Streaming or not, this dawning of the new era of Catholic compliance sounds feudalistic.
most brutal possibility
From 1945 (?) there were numerous cases of sexually motivated transgressions and acts of abuse by clerics on children and young people in institutions of the Catholic Church who were entrusted to them for education, pastoral care or training.
For many – fortunately by no means for all – those affected, these attacks resulted in significant, sometimes long-term psychological injuries.
Almost all of the crimes mentioned in the new or old report have been dealt with under criminal law: the perpetrators have been convicted, the accused have died, and presumed crimes have expired.
If one reads, hears and sees the press reports, one can doubt that the public will actually take note of this.
It often seems as if the now senile chaplains of the 1960s and the mentally disturbed village priests of the early 70s now have to be dragged from graves and nursing homes to court for tribunals of commissioners, appraisers, amateur psychiatrists and television announcers to decide whether they are in hell the »BILD« page one had to roast until death came.
Good news is easy to forget: Sexual offenses committed by Catholic clergy should not have happened more frequently in the last 25 years than sexual offenses committed by doctors or social workers, sports teachers or police officers.
The odds of being groped by a gay cleric may be greater than being killed in a railroad accident, but nowhere near as likely as dying in a car or from cancer.
It is therefore, viewed in the light of day, miraculous that the media, forums and internet spaces, and presumably also the minds of the people, were filled with screams of horror for ten days after the moving press conference in Munich.
With every new "shocked" and "stunned" that you read from the mouths of people, some of whom you had not heard from for a long time, you asked yourself: Was this person in a vegetative state for a long time?
Had she retired to a hermitage for 20 years?
Did you have hallucinations, or hadn't the result been practically certain for months?
In the event that, given the current 200 daily corona deaths, the number of 490 abuse victims in 75 years does not cause enough shock, it was reported that the number of unreported cases was probably similar to that in France.
In 2000, experts there estimated the number of victims since 1950 at 3,000.
In October 2021, the number was increased to 330,000 by »extrapolation«.
more on the subject
Pope Emeritus apologizes: Benedict's true responsibility An analysis by Annette Langer
"Malicious speculation": This is how Benedikt's lawyer defends the Pope EmeritusAn interview by Felix Bohr
In the end, it has to be said, numbers are just smoke and mirrors.
And don't forget: Contrary to popular belief, it's not the acts of abuse themselves that are constantly being "processed" and clarified, but rather their non-prosecution or denial 65, 35 or 15 years ago.
It is undoubtedly true: Numerous punishable and non-punishable sexually motivated breaches of duty by clerics have been concealed, covered up, overlooked and not sanctioned in the Catholic Church.
However, no one seriously doubted that before a lawyer from Munich recently said that 60 years ago she herself had been a top-class repentant.
The taste of independence was perhaps a little overdone here.
But you also like to watch the old horror films again and again,
and little Häwwelmann Storm has been sitting in front of the screen since 1849 and calls out: »More!
More!"
Since 1945 there have been seven archbishops in Munich.
During this period, seven bishops ruled Rome: Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.
We did not count the crowd of auxiliary bishops, general vicars and officials, so there must remain an unreported number here.
Now one of those named had to »apologize«.
He will soon be 95 and says he erred in denying attendance at a session 42 years ago.
As expected, that didn't do him any good.
He should kindly apologize again, and again, and then again.
And properly!
The current Archbishop, we have learned, was also wrong on the same matter, but that was by no means his fault.
Even the Federal Chancellor occasionally makes mistakes and quickly forgets talks in Hamburg that others have remembered for decades.
In general, it is estimated that almost one percent of all people have been wrong at some point because the error simply felt better than the truth.
I am one of them, 99 percent of the friends of truth are not.
A few questions remain: Why is it only the robes of bishops from 1980 and popes from 2005 onwards who look for traces of suspicious oblivion?
Didn't the previous ones share in the structural horror?
Wouldn't the severely disappointed Christianity revoke a few more honorary citizenships, take pictures from walls, overturn statues, issue revocation notices to saints?
And if so: what then?
As can be read everywhere, the reputation of Catholicism in general and of the religious community of the same name has been badly damaged, quite apart from the concordat and church taxes.
The church is on the disorderly march back to the edges of the orbis terrarum, visible from Munich and Rome, where its rotten bones were breathed new life 500 years ago in the face of new challenges from many heathen children.
Embassies
Ultimately, the question is, as always: what does that tell us and what should we learn from it?
Once again, this is about realizing that the world does not fall from the sky, but that the sky falls out of the world.
In other words: Humans have had exactly the spirits, gods, saints, priests and philosophers they need for a million years.
Someone whose god lives on a mist-shrouded mountaintop is certainly not an indigenous Mecklenburger, and the devil does not live in the dark forest of the desert.
If you want to understand the thoughts, opinions, attitudes and ethics of people, you should not look primarily at the so-called narratives of their morality, but at the actual living conditions of their formation and effectiveness.
Rules do not "apply" if and because they are in the Bible or in the Federal Law Gazette, they are there because certain people at certain times and for certain reasons regard them as desirable and worth following.
The northern North Americans who liberated the slaves in 1865 were no more pious than the southerners, but had factories instead of latifundia and did not need working cattle to feed them in the winter, but free sellers of themselves.
more on the subject
Abuse scandal in the Catholic Church: How Benedict gambled away his life's workBy Frank Hornig, Rome
Abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich: Three archbishops, one abuser - the timeline in the case of Peter H.
If you believe how the people who walked around 600 years ago under the weight of their sins, whose God looked every second into the innermost part of their hearts, who recognized them completely, saved everything forever so that it would be judged on the last day in saecula saeculorum, then you don't need law firms, no abuse reports, and no bishops apologizing for your sins on TV and asking forgiveness for subpar compliance.
On February 3, the Archbishop of Munich asked in the SZ: "What exactly does he want with us now, with the disaster we are stuck in as a church?" By "He" he meant his God.
One could now ask whether the »Süddeutsche Zeitung« is the forum in which the Almighty discusses with his image what exactly is wanted now.
But this question would be wrongly asked, because what defines the God of the Catholic Church is precisely the quality of having placed communication with this planet 100 percent in the hands of those who, for 2000 years, have given his answers from the echoes of their own questions hear.
No more voices come from altostratus and cumulus, no bloody tears from stony prayers.
Everywhere only forgetful people.
Although man is not equal to God,
this is what the prime minister of the Saarland put on record in the "FAZ am Sonntag" on February 6, but at least his likeness.
The ant says the same about itself when it looks in the mirror.
If she's not mistaken!
phantom pain
The shock at the reported cases of clerical abuse is to a large extent feigned.
Anyone who has not been in a deep sleep for the past 30 years cannot seriously have assumed that there had been no abuse and no denial.
Because that would really be a miracle of sociology.
Of course, sexually motivated transgressions and acts of violence in the Catholic Church were covered up to the detriment of the victims, who were often humiliated, disregarded and also marginalized.
Just like in the evangelical church, the other churches and religious communities, the schools, kindergartens, clubs.
And especially the families.
The demonstrative dismay at the fact of the decades of silence and cover-up is largely hypocritical.
The same people who demand the immediate expulsion of all "Zeitgeist" trivializers from the human community melt with emotion at the Zeitgeist that drove them or their dear parents 40 or 60 years ago.
The masturbations in the confessionals of the year 1967, the Summer of Love, are now to be explained "ruthlessly" down to the last tear!
Why shouldn't the pensions of all education ministers be subsequently reduced and the commemorative publications burned, during the reign of which millions of children were beaten in schools?
Don't get me wrong: the "system of denial" and cover-up that is often called "structural" without explaining what is meant by it undoubtedly existed.
However, it existed for the "structures" of society as a whole - what else?
One cannot seriously believe that the children and young people exploited by gay, heterosexual or pedophile priests only did not scandalize the attacks or in vain because the dark labyrinth of horrors of the pastors existed secretly beneath a bright world of affection and encouragement.
Or that the victims remained alone, although they were safe at home, at school, in the social environment.
The opposite is true.
Certainly: a lot of cover-ups and deniers sit and sit in pious hypocrites.
So where does the excitement factor come from?
Why are millions of euros revealing truths from 30 or 50 years ago that everyone already knows?
And above all: What is to happen when the so-called »processing« is finished?
It is said to be »only the beginning«.
Question: From what?
The answer that "it must not repeat itself" is nonsense.
Anyone who wants child abuse and humiliation not to be repeated must go to the refugee camps and slums of the world and not to St. Peter's Square.
Certainly there will be people who are willing to take on the enlightening and vicarious suffering ad infinitum for a reasonable fee.
For the time being, the bishops' conference has published a list of dioceses in which no assessment team has yet investigated whether there may have been cases of cover-ups and brothers who had neglected their duty.
Until every city has at least three full-time independent officers, there is no end in sight to retrospective compliance.
But the anger, the contempt, the condemnation of the Catholic Church, which one experiences everywhere, have other sources than the retelling of yellowed contents of files;
and compensation payments from third parties to third parties are generally not the main concern of the majority.
If you listen more closely, you will hear something else.
On the one hand, there is the sound of disgust and fear transformed into pure aggression, which is typical of the collective emotion against child sexual abuse and, above all, homosexual pedophilia.
On the other hand, there is the childlike anger at the fact that more remnants of security are shattered.
What the Munich cardinal vaguely described in his February 3 interview as a God-sent "disaster" of morality is in fact just the next outburst of infantile hatred of being abandoned and betrayed, left alone in the empty world.
Not that this is new to 99 percent of the local people!
For 200 years they have replaced the once almighty bit by bit with feel-good prose and private morals: In "something", as the practiced talk show guest puts it today, one would like to "believe" in "something" apart from the key interest rate and one's own Twitter -Account.
The churches are happy to help with this.
If those who claim to believe in "something" seriously believed that there is an all-knowing power on which their existence and eternity depends, they would crowd in front of churches and not in front of beauty shops.
It's a repeat of a well-known play: When it turns out that the almighty father is a normal part-time failure and the immeasurable mother is a full-time egocentric schemer, anger and sadness are great.
The people here like to spare themselves the realization that life leads to death and that there should first be a phase of adulthood.
When he discovers that a greedy genitals live under the feel-good coat and that Lukas the engine driver is a child abuser, his anger knows no bounds.
So the church is like all other structures of external leadership and powerful security that have melted away in globalization.
Communities became individuals, responsibility became self-optimization, external management became disoriented.
The community of the God-fearing first became a cuddly group therapy and then an individual wellness on demand.
This liberation may or may not be taken for the end of history.
But to get outraged without help is unintelligent.
The phantom pain is undoubtedly severe.
Healing is not promised by retrospective reckoning with enemies long since vanquished, but by serious efforts to create new structures and institutions of trust.
They will not come from mumbo-jumbo of identity or the invention of ever new lifestyle and gender fantasies.