Global Courant
BERLIN — A scandal surrounding sex abuse allegations against a long-dead cardinal has created a “very difficult situation” for Germany’s troubled Catholic Church, a top German bishop said Monday, hours after a statue of the late cleric was removed from its spot outside the Cathedral. from Essen.
The allegations against Cardinal Franz Hengsbach, who died in 1991, added to a long-running clergy abuse scandal that has rocked the German church.
Last week, the Essen diocese said there were suspicions that Hengsbach may have abused a 16-year-old girl in the 1950s when he was auxiliary bishop in nearby Paderborn, and that another person – according to the German news agency dpa – is also a woman. – also accuses him of abuse in 1967, when he was bishop of Essen.
In a letter to parishes released on Friday, the current Bishop of Essen, Franz-Josef Overbeck, apologized for his mistakes in handling the allegations.
He said he heard about the first accusation in 2011 but did nothing after the Vatican determined it was not plausible. “I must now admit that the allegations in 2011 were misjudged and that injustice was done to those involved,” he wrote. The subsequent abuse allegation — which the diocese said was made last October and came to Overbeck’s attention in March — led church officials to dig deeper this year.
Church officials decided Friday to remove the larger-than-life statue of Hengsbach, which was unveiled in 2011. On Monday morning it was lifted onto a truck by a crane. It needs to be put in storage.
The Diocese of Essen last week called on the faithful to come forward with further allegations of abuse. On Monday it said that some new reports had been received and would be assessed, dpa reported. Hengsbach was Bishop of Essen from the foundation of the diocese in 1958 until 1991. In 1988 he was appointed cardinal.
In 2018, a church-commissioned report concluded that at least 3,677 people in Germany were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014. More than half of the victims were 13 years old or younger, and almost a third served as altar boys.
Hengsbach’s accusations became public shortly before a regular autumn meeting of the German Bishops’ Conference, which started on Monday. He is the highest-ranking German cleric against whom such accusations have been made.
“This is really a very difficult situation, not only for the Bishop of Essen and the entire diocese of Essen, but for us as a whole,” the conference’s chairman, Limburg Bishop Georg Baetzing, told reporters in Wiesbaden. “But I say everything has to be on the table – the truth has to be on the table; that is the only way to do right by those affected.”
Baetzing said that “the uncertainty for the faithful in this diocese, when you consider the high pedestal on which this man stood as a founding bishop … is incomparable.”
The head of an influential lay organization, the Central Committee of German Catholics, underlined why the case exacerbates the church’s problems.
“The church’s suspected actions and cover-up strategy, which has been newly documented, destroy the remaining trust,” Irme Stetter-Karp said in a statement. “Once again the impression is created that the perpetrators, and not those affected, were protected.”
