The diocese of Eichstätt first made the most recent case public: There was a preliminary investigation under canon law against a priest from the district of Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, the press office of the ordinariate announced two weeks ago. The clergyman himself informed the diocese at the end of March that the public prosecutor’s office was investigating him and had his apartment searched.
The allegation against the churchman is “sexual abuse of children without physical contact with the child,” according to the public prosecutor’s office in Nuremberg-Fürth. The clergyman is said to have made pornographic comments to the alleged victim – whether orally or via chat message, the public prosecutor’s office does not say any more details. According to the public prosecutor’s office, he knows nothing about the fact that the diocese of Eichstätt had only withdrawn the priest from his former parish and sent him to the Neumarkt district a year earlier because of similar allegations.
About this history has on Thursday Danube courier reported. Accordingly, the said chaplain had to leave a community in the Eichstätt district a year ago because he is said to have verbally crossed borders with a then minor and with at least one other woman. The professorship in Eichstätt admits that there have been allegations. The diocese’s advisory staff, which also includes external contacts and experts, “consulted intensively” about the incidents at the priest’s former place of work.
According to the status at that time, there were no allegations relevant to canon law and therefore no preliminary investigation under canon law, the ordinariate further informed. Nevertheless, the priest was “temporarily taken out of pastoral and school work” and offered him therapeutic help, which he accepted. The Eichstätt vicar general at the time, Michael Huber, had decided that the priest could be deployed “under supervision”. “According to our information,” Huber informed the pastor at the chaplain’s new place of work about all of this in a personal conversation, the ordinariate said. The recent incident did not take place “in the pastoral context of this parish”.
The person concerned is on leave with reduced remuneration and has a residence ban
Nevertheless, this time the diocese apparently considers the incident relevant enough in terms of canon law to conduct a preliminary investigation. “The measures from the past would now also be intensively evaluated and assessed”. For the time being, the priest is on leave with reduced salary, the diocese has “exposed a ban on residence for his previous place of residence and work”, the new vicar general Michael Alberter, who was appointed last September, accepted the priest’s resignation. Final measures would only be imposed after the end of the proceedings, according to the diocese, which also points to the presumption of innocence, as does the public prosecutor’s office.
Their dealings with clergy, who are initially only suspected of sexual abuse, as is currently the case in the diocese of Eichstätt, or who have been convicted of it, as in countless other cases, drives the Catholic Church in Germany like no other topic. In the case of Pope Benedict XVI, who died at the end of 2022, abusers were simply sent to other communities by church leaders. led to civil proceedings at the district court in Traunstein. Because the relevant acts of abuse have long since become statute-barred under criminal law, a victim of such a transferred priest has sued for damages – including against Benedict, who was responsible for the transfer of the priest when he was Archbishop of Munich. The court wants to hear in June, in addition to the other defendants, Benedict’s possible heirs could then be used.
The Diocese of Eichstätt also has to deal with criminally statute-barred acts of abuse. Two weeks ago, for example, a friar was banned from staying in the diocese, who had previously also lived in the Neumarkt district and had been recalled from there by his order after allegations of abusive behavior. The public prosecutor’s office dropped its investigation last May due to the statute of limitations. The previously unknown case of a priest who is said to have distributed pornographic material in the Eichstätt district in 2020 is not time-barred, but was discontinued by the Ingolstadt public prosecutor’s office according to its own statements “due to a lack of evidence”. Loud Danube courier this priest is now working in a parish abroad.
Eichstätt itself is a city that is as permeated by the Catholic Church as few others. But even there, cracks have been opening for a long time. Only a few weeks ago, the city council decided to give a new name to a street named after the former bishop Alois Brems in 1997. Brems, who died in 1987, headed the diocese from 1968 to 1984. According to a report by the diocese’s investigation commission presented at the end of 2022, Brems not only covered up acts of abuse by clergy, but also secretly continued to pay a priest from Eichstätt and helped him to flee as a missionary to Africa, although This was wanted by arrest warrant because he is said to have abused girls and young women in several Bavarian communities in the 1960s. The theological faculty of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, which appointed Brems an honorary doctorate in 1986, distanced itself from him in January.