The Sourdough Initiative, which is committed to dealing with the abuse scandal in Garching an der Alz in Upper Bavaria, is calling on Pope Francis to enter the lawsuit before the Traunstein District Court. Namely as the “legal successor of Benedict XVI”, as it says in an open letter from the initiative that was published on Saturday. “Your unconditional cooperation in a judicial clarification would be an important step that gets to the root of the devastating taboo and trivialization of the extent of abuse and removes the cover of pedo-criminal structures within the clergy,” wrote those responsible for the initiative to Francis.
The aim of the lawsuit is, among other things, to determine whether those responsible for the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising covered up crimes and thus made further crimes possible. Shortly after the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. the district court had declared that the lawsuit against Benedikt is continuing, at least for the time being. The reason: there is a legal representative; Joseph Ratzinger, as his real name was, hired a large law firm to represent him. However, his lawyers can request a break until it is clear who the heirs are. The lawsuit would then be directed against them in the future.
In the summer of last year, a man who said he was abused by the convicted repeat offender Priest H. in Garching an der Alz brought a civil action, a so-called declaratory action, at the Traunstein District Court. It is directed against the condemned priest himself, against the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising, against the former Archbishop Cardinal Friedrich Wetter there – and was also directed against Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died on New Year’s Eve. He was archbishop in Munich at the time the abuser was transferred to the diocese.