Uwe Böttcher hasn’t been director of the Mainkofen district hospital in Lower Bavaria for a long time and then something like that. It’s last Friday, around 30 guests are gathering outside at the memorial stone for the “euthanasia” victims of Mainkofen. As every year, they want to remember those who were murdered by the National Socialists. It should be a day of prayer, of pausing. And then Slavko Radeljic-Jakic steps up to the lectern. He is a deacon, a Catholic minister, white robe, purple stole, a man of the church and he says incredible sentences. The killing hasn’t stopped, he preaches, humanity is still “threatened by the global heirs of the National Socialist eugenicists” with the help of “unscrupulous, closely networked billionaires”. The SZ has the speech.
Uwe Böttcher can’t believe what he’s hearing. Radeljic-Jakic has been coming to his clinic for more than ten years. Many of the patients are mentally ill and have a conspiracy theorist as their pastor? For five minutes, the deacon talks about the Americans who smuggled 1,600 Nazi scientists into the United States, about billionaires who “seized total control” and about their goal of reducing the world population and “using transhuman robots to replace”. Please what?
Böttcher is “perplexed”, then outraged, in front of everyone he confronts Radeljic-Jakic. He speaks of a “defamation and denigration of the reputation of the murdered” and calls on the deacon to stop his crude theories. Only: As soon as he has the floor again, he continues. That’s all right, he’s researched it. “Enough now,” says Böttcher and throws him out. House ban; ban on entering the house. That will not do.
Since then, the clinic director has received a lot of praise for acting so promptly and harshly. He is probably not the only one who suddenly has to do with the wildest theories in his environment. But in a clinic for the mentally ill, they can cause far more than a family row. “We have to protect the patients,” says Böttcher. When Radeljic-Jakic publicly warns of a “reduction in world population”, what did he then tell the patients? Böttcher doesn’t even want to think about it.
Hardly anyone enjoys as much trust in a clinic as chaplains, hardly anyone enters into a closer relationship with patients. Mentally ill people are particularly receptive to such suggestions, says Böttcher. And worse, they can make them even sicker. Anyone who suffers from persecution mania anyway could “get it one more time” through conspiracy theories. Anyone who suspects evil around every corner because of an anxiety disorder will find particularly fertile ground in such statements. Especially if they didn’t come from some “barker”, as Böttcher says, but from a man who is considered competent to take care of people’s souls. Böttcher has not yet been able to determine that one of the patients was really damaged by the deacon’s explanations. Thank God.
The diocese wants to discuss “his future use” with the deacon
Which would take you to Radeljic-Jakic’s employer, the diocese of Regensburg. A spokesman said the diocese rejected statements like those made by the deacon at the memorial service. Radeljic-Jakic, who has been working for the diocese since 1991, has to comply with the ban on entry, “his services in the district hospital are therefore suspended”. The diocese will talk to him promptly “to discuss his future use”.
Uwe Böttcher says he doesn’t know anything about canon law, but he thinks that anyone who publicly spreads conspiracy theories shouldn’t work as a pastor. And something else drives him. What to do to prevent something like this from happening again? “The question is how the Catholic Church selects and looks after pastors,” says Böttcher. She has to keep in touch with her pastors to notice when someone drifts into the lateral thinker camp. Because: “If there had been any indications, we could have intervened earlier.”
Böttcher himself found a clue, years ago the current lateral thinker deacon is said to have attracted attention with Islamophobic statements. Even then, the hospital director at the time “forbade him from making any political statements”. No one can verify whether he adhered to this in his discussions with patients. He did not lose his job as a pastor. It could be different this time. The deacon could also feel consequences from the worldly side. Hospital director Böttcher has filed a criminal complaint for incitement to hatred, but it is still unclear whether the criminal offenses will be fulfilled.
Radeljic-Jakic himself did not comment, let himself be Passau New Press but render it with a quote from Augustine: “The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it”, he says, she will defend herself. Doesn’t sound like the deacon has fundamentally changed his mind about “transhuman robots”.