Report finds retired Pope Benedict XVI connected to sexual abuse cover-up

A new report on sexual abuse covered up in the Catholic church places some of the blame on retired Pope Benedict XVI. At issue are four cases he handled as archbishop of Germany’s Munich diocese from 1977-1982. The law firm that drew up the report indicated Benedict “strictly denies any wrongdoing on his part” and gave extensive written testimony.

Prior to having been elected Pope in 2005 and taking the name Benedict, he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Benedict retired in 2013.

“In a total of four cases, we came to the conclusion that the then-archbishop, Cardinal Ratzinger, can be accused of misconduct,” said one of the report’s authors, Martin Pusch.

Two of those cases, he said, involved perpetrators who offended while he was in office and were punished by the judicial system but were kept in pastoral work without express limits on what they were allowed to do. No action was ordered under canon law.

In a third case, a cleric who had been convicted by a court outside Germany was put into service in the Munich archdiocese. According to Pusch, Ratzinger knew of the priest’s previous history.

When the church abuse scandal first flared in Germany in 2010, attention swirled around another case: that of a pedophile priest whose transfer to Munich to undergo therapy was approved under Ratzinger in 1980.

The priest was allowed to resume pastoral work, a decision that the church has said was made by a lower-ranking official without consulting the archbishop. In 1986, the priest received a suspended sentence for molesting a boy.

The archdiocese commissioned the report from law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl nearly two years ago, with a mandate to look into abuse between 1945 and 2019 and whether church officials handled allegations correctly. The law firm examined church files and spoke to witnesses.