The report says that Benedict was aware of at least four cases of abuse of children by his subordinates, but did not react in any way.
The previous Pope Benedict XVI, who headed the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013 and voluntarily resigned, appears in the report on child abuse.
This is reported by the Independent and the BBC.
The cases of child abuse allegedly occurred during his tenure as Archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977 to 1982. The report of the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) says that Benedict knew about at least four cases of abuse of his subordinates over children, but did not react in any way.
“We believe that he (Benedict — Ed.) can be accused of misconduct in four cases. Two of these cases relate to abuses committed during his tenure and sanctioned by the State. In both cases, the perpetrators remained to work as pastors,” said lawyer Martin Push, who was a co-author of the report.
For example, a priest named Peter G. was transferred from the city of Essen to Munich after it turned out that he had abused children. After undergoing psychotherapy, he was allowed to work as a priest again.
The ex-pope has submitted an 82-page application to the WSW, according to German media. Its speaker told the Bild tabloid that he “takes the fate of victims of violence very much to heart.” However, Benedict denied that he knew anything about the facts of violence in the church.
At the same time, there are documents in the report that convincingly testify that the ex-pope was present at the meeting where this topic was discussed.
The WSW report mentions at least 497 cases of child abuse from 1945 to 2019 in Germany. The authors of the previous report counted more than 3,600 Germans who were abused by the clergy between 1946 and 2014.
The abuse mainly concerned boys under the age of 13. Many of the victims were servants of the priests at the altar.
Benedict is also accused of failing to prevent child abuse when he was a cardinal. It is reported that he knew about the crimes in the religious order of the Legionnaires of Christ, whose founder, the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, turned out to be a pedophile. Maciel, who died in 2008, was accused of sexually abusing dozens of minors.
It should be noted that Benedict XVI is the third pope in the history of the Catholic Church and the first in the last 600 years to voluntarily abdicate.
Earlier it was reported that the ex-cardinal of the Vatican was accused of raping a teenager for the first time.
