Fresh claims against Pope over abuse cases
Updated on 26 March 2010
Vatican faces further claims Pope Benedict XVI ignored pleas to take action against priests who sexually abused children.
Catholic churches in Europe rallied behind Pope Benedict today, rejecting claims he had covered up child sex abuse by priests in both the US and Germany, and praising him as a leader determined to combat scandals challenging the Church.
France's bishops conference, the archbishop of London and the Munich archdiocese that Benedict once headed all rejected allegations from the media a day after the Vatican angrily accused its critics of an "ignoble attempt" to smear him.
"How can he possibly discipline other bishops around the world if it's now being shown he did the same thing."
The Munich archdiocese Benedict headed between 1977 and 1982 denied a New York Times report that the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been informed that a priest under therapy for paedophilia was reassigned to a post with access to children.
"We stand by our account that Cardinal Ratzinger didn't know about this decision," spokesman Bernhard Kellner told Reuters.
"I cannot confirm he knew about this." The Times report said Ratzinger was copied in on a memo about the transfer of Rev. Peter Hullermann, who was convicted six years later of molesting a boy but remained active as a priest until he was identified in the current scandal wave.
"An archbishop doesn't read all the administrative acts. He just can't. That's why he has a vicar general," Kellner added.
The then vicar general, Rev. Gerhard Gruber, took full responsibility earlier this month for reinstating Hullermann, who has since been suspended from his priestly duties.
But Peter Isley, US-based director of a sex abuse survivors group, told Channel 4 News, that he felt the evidence was growing against the Pope.
He said: "It's (reports from Munich) another brick in the mounting wall of evidence that this Pope was involved, as so many bishops have been around the world, in covering up these crimes.
The New York Times reported on Thursday that the Vatican did not defrock a US priest accused of sexually abusing up to 200 deaf boys in Milwaukee from the 1950s to the 1970s.
A Vatican spokesman said civil authorities had investigated his abuse in 1974 without bringing charges against him.
Michael Walsh, a historian of Catholicism, told Channel 4 News: "He (the Pope) wrote to the Irish berating them for their failure to act, and now it seems he himself has failed to do exactly the same thing in the same situation.
"If you can be left with ecclesiastical egg on your face, that's what he's left with."
