Ex-pope Benedict apologises for giving ‘incorrect’ information to German inquiry after report found he failed to take action against priests in four cases of sexual abuse
- Ex-pope Benedict admitted providing incorrect information to German inquiry
- It was about his presence at a 1980 meeting discussing a paedophile priest
- A report found he knowingly failed to stop four priests accused of child abuse
Former pope Benedict XVI on Monday admitted providing incorrect information to a German inquiry about his presence at a 1980 meeting discussing a paedophile priest, blaming an editing ‘oversight’.
‘He is very sorry for this mistake and asks to be excused,’ Benedict’s personal secretary Georg Ganswein said in a statement cited by the KNA news agency and republished by Vatican News.
But the statement insisted no decision was made at the meeting about reassigning the priest to pastoral duties.
An independent report last week found that Benedict XVI, who stood down in 2013, knowingly failed to stop four priests accused of child sex abuse in the 1980s.
A bombshell report has accused former Pope Benedict (pictured during a weekly audience in the Vatican when he was the pontiff) of misconduct over his handling of four cases of sexual abuse by priests while he was an archbishop in Germany
The report by law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) was commissioned by the archdiocese of Munich and Freising to examine how abuse cases were dealt with between 1945 and 2019.
Ex-pope Benedict – whose civilian name is Joseph Ratzinger – was the archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982.
In one case, a now notorious paedophile priest named Peter Hullermann was transferred to Munich from Essen in western Germany where he had been accused of abusing an 11-year-old boy.
The law firm, which was commissioned to draw up the report by the Munich archdiocese, said that Benedict – whose civilian name is Josef Ratzinger (pictured in the Vatican after being elected Pope in April 2005) – strongly denies any wrongdoing
Hullermann was reassigned to pastoral duties despite his history and continued to reoffend for many years.
The lawyers said that ‘to our surprise’, Benedict had denied attending the meeting in 1980 at which the decision was made to admit Hullermann to the diocese, despite being quoted directly in the minutes of the meeting.
The statement from the emeritus pope said: ‘He would like to make it clear now that, contrary to what was stated at the hearing, he did attend the Ordinariate meeting on January 15, 1980.
‘The statement to the contrary was therefore objectively incorrect,’ it added, while insisting this was ‘not done out of bad faith, but was the result of an oversight in the editing of his statement’.
‘Objectively correct, however, remains the statement, documented by the files, that in his meeting no decision was made about a pastoral assignment of the priest in question,’ it said.
Benedict, (pictured in 1980) who served as the archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, also approved the transfer of a suspected paedophile priest to the archdiocese to undergo therapy in 1980
‘Rather, only the request to provide him with accommodation during his therapeutic treatment in Munich was granted.’
The statement said further explanations would follow but the 94-year-old pope, who is said to be in shaky health, is still reading the inquiry report.
‘At present, he is carefully reading the statements set down there, which fill him with shame and pain about the suffering inflicted on the victims,’ it said.
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