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Ralf Meister, regional bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover, speaks at a press conference.
© Moritz Frankenberg/dpa
Ralf Meister referred those affected who were abused in church as children to lawyers instead of taking care of them personally as Hanover's regional bishop.
But he doesn't want to resign.
Hanover - Hanover's Protestant regional bishop Ralf Meister has admitted mistakes in dealing with those affected by sexual violence, but has currently ruled out resigning from his office.
The 62-year-old theologian responded to journalists on Friday to the report of an independent commission on child abuse in the King Christ Community in Oesede in the Osnabrück district.
It was “insensitive and wrong” to refer those affected to the responsible legal department from 2011 onwards, Meister said on Friday.
“I contributed to the fact that those affected continued to not be heard adequately.”
A deacon in the community who died in 2018 is accused of sexually abusing at least eight children, some of them seriously.
Oesede is a district of Georgsmarienhütte.
According to the report, church officials covered up the acts described by parents in the 1970s, and the cases were not even mentioned in the man's termination letter in 1977.
In autumn 2021, a woman reported under the pseudonym Lisa Meyer about the serious sexual abuse she suffered as an eleven-year-old and for which the former deacon from Oesede was never prosecuted.
The reappraisal commission also confirmed that the Hanover Regional Church Office had made “serious failures” in the reappraisal since 2011. “I consider the resignation of Regional Bishop Meister to be important and right at this point in time and I am not alone in this opinion,” Meyer told the dpa on Wednesday.
Meister said that after consideration and examination of conscience, he decided to remain in the service despite the mistakes he had made.
When asked whether he was harming the church, the regional bishop said: “You do not decide the question of credibility yourself, the question of credibility is decided by others.” His office is awarded by election and is limited.
If signals came from voluntary and full-time representatives of the church “that credibility is massively threatened by me personally, that would create a new situation for me.”
dpa