Bad, bad news out of Germany, where Jesuit abusers are coming out of the woodwork in a national scandal.
The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases. Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years. After years of suppression, the wall of silence appears to be crumbling.
says Der Spiegel, whose punched-up reporting delivers a shock.
Berlin’s Canisius College, an elite Jesuit high school, recently disclosed the sordid past of a number of members of the order, who had abused students at the school in the 1970s and 1980s [after which] new victims began coming forward on a daily basis. By last Friday, at least 40 of them had accused three Jesuit priests of molesting children and adolescents, first in Berlin and later at the St. Ansgar School in Hamburg, the St. Blasien College in the Black Forest and in several parishes in the northern German state of Lower Saxony.
We ain’t heard nothin’ yet.
[T]he revelations . . . are merely “the tip of the iceberg,” says the current director of Canisius College, Father Klaus Mertes, who made public the sexual abuse of students.
The German bishops are coming clean. Spiegel surveyed 27 dioceses last week, of which 24 responded.
[A]t least 94 priests and members of the laity in Germany are suspected or have been suspected of abusing countless children and adolescents since 1995.
Group-home abuse has been charted since the 50s, almost half of which homes are Catholic-operated.
According to the report, more than 150 victims of sexual abuse have come forward with their stories in recent months. One of them is a woman who, as a 15-year-old girl, had to sit in the confessional and watch a priest masturbate. When she tried to get away from him, she was beaten by the nuns who ran the home.
The top cleric is saying nothing.
To this day, the chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop of Freiburg Robert Zollitsch, has not offered any convincing [sic] words of apology or emphatic gestures of redress to the victims of the church’s double standard.
He won’t talk to Spiegel, which does seem to be out for blood, especially in light of such blatant editorializing as this:
The official Church prefers not to allow the suffering of its victims to become a major issue, because it doesn’t fit into the Church’s hypocritical worldview.
Not exactly nuanced.
Later: NY Times has picked up on the story, noting that Der Spiegel’s cover this week had “an image of a priest reaching suggestively under his robes.”
“Already a tremor is shaking the church, which could be the beginning of an earthquake” Der Spiegel said.
Blithe Spirit 
I’m not happy that Germany now has a problem with sexual abuse committed by priests who have broken their oaths to God. When the same situation happened in the U.S., she was roundly criticized around the world and here at home, as this nation should have been. Germany’s exposure of sexual abuse by priests should be a lesson to the world that sexual abuse is not just an isolated thing. I’m sure the same sexual abuse by priests exists in many other countries, but that it is being kept under wraps for the sake of the Catholic Church. Sexual abuse by priests is an age old problem and one that will always be with the Catholic Church. Perhaps with better screening before candidates enter seminary, the problem might be lessened.
LikeLike