The Munich public prosecutor’s office and the Catholic Church are silent on the search in the Archdiocese – the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, on the other hand, has now officially confirmed it. Accordingly, the investigators were looking for an alleged “poison cabinet” with hidden documents on the abuse scandal. On February 16, several public prosecutors and detectives, equipped with a judicial search warrant, came to the Ordinariate, the administrative center of the diocese, and to the Archbishop’s Palace, the official and residence of Cardinal Reinhard Marx. According to SZ information, there is no suspicion against him or the rest of the current diocese; the ministry does not provide any information on this.
In response to questions from the FDP member of the state parliament Matthias Fischbach, a high-ranking ministry official writes to him about the suspicion of the public prosecutor’s office: “Former church leaders” in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising could have reinstated a priest who had previously been convicted of abuse as a pastor “and not prevented him from having children again makes contact”.
According to SZ information, the investigations relate to a case from the abuse report. It describes how the Church dealt with a deceased priest who was sentenced to five years in prison in the 1960s. After his release from prison, he was employed as a hospital chaplain. Allegations from the 2000s, according to which the priest maintains an “excessively close relationship with the hospital servers”, have never been clarified within the church, according to reports.
The ministry has now announced that two witnesses reported to the investigators that there was a safe or “a kind of ‘poison cabinet'” in the archdiocese’s rooms, in which files on cases of abuse could be found. However, the search “did not confirm” that the archdiocese had withheld documents about abuse. “Neither in the safe nor in the supposed ‘poison cabinet’ were any documents relevant to the proceedings found.”
Members of the diocese confirmed during the search “that such a storage practice actually existed in the past. However, this had ended many years ago.” According to the ministry, this is confirmed by three papers found. They show how previously apparently separate documents had been transferred to the regular files. Otherwise, no previously unknown documents were found. The Archdiocese has been emphasizing for years that it is working with the public prosecutor’s office and handing over all the papers requested.
FDP man Fischbach considers the search to be “overdue”. His party has long criticized the investigators’ previous practice of “only accepting files from the church administration in good faith”. Now the judiciary must clarify who in the archdiocese is responsible for the earlier secret files. According to Fischbach, the question is whether the “secret parallel files” might have been used to frustrate criminal prosecution.