The fact that the church judge Lorenz Wolf resigned his offices was the only personnel consequence of the Munich abuse report. His successor at the head of the Catholic Bureau is surprising.
The successor to the resigned church judge Lorenz Wolf at the head of the Bavarian Catholic Office is not a priest. The Bavarian bishops want to make the political scientist Matthias Belafi head of the office, as the Freising Bishops’ Conference announced on Thursday in Munich. The 45-year-old is scheduled to take office on March 1, 2023.
According to the information, he is the first non-priest to head the Catholic Office, which is considered the interface between the Catholic Church and politics in the Free State. Prelate Wolf had resigned from office in March after severe criticism from many quarters in response to his controversial role in dealing with cases of abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.
It is the only personal consequence so far that the abuse report for the archdiocese presented in January, which made headlines worldwide, had. Since his resignation, the lawyer Bettina Nickel had temporarily headed the Catholic Office. In their report published in January, the lawyers at the Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) law firm accused Wolf of misconduct as a church lawyer when processing cases of sexual abuse in the archdiocese . Specifically, they spoke of twelve cases with “cause for criticism”.
He also acted too much in favor of the priests and perpetrators and too little in the interests of the victims and sometimes too skeptical towards them. For his part, Wolf criticized the approach of the experts. His successor at the head of the Catholic Office is moving from Düsseldorf to Munich.
Prelate Wolf resigned as head of the Catholic Office in March after severe criticism.
(Photo: Annette Riedl/dpa)
Since 2018, Belafi has headed the “Contacts with churches, Jewish religious communities and other religious and ideological communities, religious constitutional law” department in the State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia. Before that, he worked for more than ten years in the secretariat of the German Bishops’ Conference in Bonn as Managing Director of the Commission for Societal and Social Issues, dealing with the national and European political positioning of the German bishops. According to the information, Belafi is a member of the Central Committee of German Catholics and the Synodal Assembly of the Synodal Path, is married and has two children.
On behalf of the Bavarian bishops, the Bavarian Catholic Office maintains contacts with the state government, the state parliament, municipal umbrella organizations, the judiciary, representatives of business and trade unions, authorities and associations. The office’s tasks include “fundamental questions of a national nature that go beyond the concerns of a single diocese,” said the Freising Bishops’ Conference, the association of Catholic bishops in Bavaria.