Lawsuit for abuse – legal proceedings against Pope Benedict suspended

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The trial of Joseph Ratzinger – the recently deceased Pope Benedict XVI. – at the German regional court in Traunstein has been temporarily suspended. A spokeswoman for the court confirmed this on Tuesday. The law firm of the late emeritus pope has requested that the proceedings be interrupted until a legal successor is found.

Once that is the case, it will resume, the spokeswoman said. Proceedings against other accused church officials, however, continue. The Bayerischer Rundfunk and the research collective Correctiv had previously reported on the temporary suspension.

Are actions covered up?
A man who said he had been abused by the convicted repeat offender Priester H. in Garching an der Alz filed a civil suit, a so-called declaratory judgment, with the Traunstein district in the summer of last year. Court of law. It’s not just directed at Ratzinger, who was Archbishop of Munich and Freising at the time the abuser was transferred to his diocese. The lawsuit is also against the convicted man himself, the archdiocese and Ratzinger’s successor in the office of archbishop, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter. The purpose of the lawsuit is, among other things, to determine whether those responsible in the diocese have covered up crimes and thus facilitate further crimes.

Ratzinger, Wetter and also the current cardinal of Munich, Reinhard Marx, were accused of personal misconduct in several cases in a report. A year after the publication of the sensational study, Marx once again apologized to those affected on Tuesday. “I will always be responsible for the suffering this entails and therefore once again apologize,” the Archbishop of Munich and Freising said on Tuesday. “I can’t undo what happened, but I can act differently now and in the future. And I do.”

“The terror continued”
The fact that the perspective of those affected initially received too little attention was “our biggest shortcoming. We must do that as a church, I must admit that as an archbishop self-critically”. Even a year after the report, the horror of the business is high. “The terror remained,” said Marx. “Abuse is and will remain a catastrophe.” The report, commissioned by the diocese, by the Munich law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) assumes at least 497 victims and 235 alleged perpetrators – and a much larger number of unreported cases.

Marx called Tuesday to report evidence of possible abuse. According to his diocese, since the publication of the study in January 2022, 57 reports have been received by the end of the year to the independent contacts for investigating suspected cases. This includes information on border violations that do not fall under sexual abuse, as well as information on cases of abuse that are already known.

Source: Krone

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