During his time as archbishop in Germany, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, chaired a meeting in which a pedophile priest’s living arrangements and therapy were discussed. He must have been familiar with the man’s criminal past. Catholic Church officials assigned full responsibility for the reassignment of a known pedophilic priest to retired vicar general Gerhard Gruber who served as deputy to Joseph Ratzinger when he was archbishop. Gruber is now challenging a Church statement that he ‘acted on his own authority,’ a claim he says was never discussed with him. The emergency plan was hastily assembled in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising on the evening of March 11, a Thursday. The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper had exposed the scandal surrounding pedophile priest Peter H., and the affair over sexual abuse in the church was getting dangerously close to the pope. Peter H., a vicar from the western German city of Essen who had molested boys on several occasions, was sent to Munich in 1980, where he was assigned to work as a pastor again . As a result, he was able to abuse even more boys. The archbishop and chairman of the diocesan council, which […]