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Friday, January 11th, 2013

German Catholic Church Cancels Inquiry

Author:     BARBARA HANS
Source:     Der Spiegel (Germany)
Publication Date:     January 09, 2013 | 04:54 PM
Link: German Catholic Church Cancels Inquiry
Stephan:   I hate this story, and the trend it represents, and it never seems to end. Readers sent me three different stories today about their local version of the same thing, and I have decided to run them all to give a sense of my reaction to these emails. How the believing community of Catholics, who are the living church, tolerate this I cannot comprehend. It must be extraordinarily painful for them. It is certainly painful for me to read these stories, and to think about the tens of thousands of children whose sexual abuse by the hierarchy lies at the core of these stories.

An independent inquiry into sex abuse in the German Catholic Church was supposed to restore faith in the embattled institution. But now the Church has called it off, citing a breakdown in trust with the researchers.

It was a major promise after a major disaster: In summer 2011, the Catholic Church in Germany pledged full transparency. One year earlier, an abuse scandal had shaken the country’s faithful, as an increasing number of cases surfaced in which priests had sexually abused children and then hidden behind a wall of silence.

The Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute (KFN) was given the job of investigating the cases in 2011. The personnel files from churches in all 27 dioceses were to be examined for cases of abuse in an attempt to win back some of the Church’s depleted credibility.

But now the Church has called off the study, citing a breakdown in trust. ‘The relationship of mutual trust between the bishops and the head of the institute has been destroyed,’ said the Bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, on Wednesday morning.

The director of the KFN, Christian Pfeiffer, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the Church had refused to cooperate. At the end of last year, he contacted the dioceses twice […]

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