On February 1, 2022, at midday, there are no free appointments on the homepage of the Regensburg registry office for the rest of the month to leave the Catholic Church. It is the abuse report for the archdiocese of Munich and Freising that triggered shock waves that can be felt in the diocese of Regensburg. You are used to a lot here. Here Gerhard Ludwig Müller was head shepherd from 2002 to 2012, later cardinal and prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known as an arch-conservative hardliner who repeatedly encounters criticism even in circles very loyal to the church.
In an action that was unique in Germany, he abolished the diocesan council in Regensburg, the most important lay body. Here the abuse of hundreds of children in the world-famous boys’ choir of the Regensburger Domspatzen became apparent, which Georg Ratzinger, the brother of the emeritus pope, conducted for many years. Here is Rudolf Voderholzer Bishop, who also does not stand out with liberal views. But what the Munich report brought to light, especially since the guilt that the Regensburg honorary citizen Pope Benedict XVI. should have loaded on itself, gives the whole thing a new dimension in the eyes of many believers.
“I sense that there is great outrage in Regensburg about how a church, which should be operating on completely different ethical grounds, can behave in this way,” says Mayor Gertrud Maltz-Schwarzfischer (SPD). The diocese itself has now set up an exit telephone. The head of the diocese’s pastoral office, the head of Caritas and a priest are ready with a photo and their cell phone numbers. “The people on the phone report a lot of conversations. Many factual and critical. Others angry and agitated. Others encouraging and supporting. The offer is accepted and came at the right time,” says Clemens Neck, spokesman for the diocese.
The atmosphere in the Ordinariate is tense, people are skeptical about the press and fear unfair treatment, especially since the statements made by Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer. He recently said at the Synodal Assembly that a criminal law reform of 1973 no longer counted child abuse as a crime “on the basis of sexological judgments that assume that the interrogations are much worse for the children and young people concerned than the basically harmless ones cases of abuse”. The horror is great, he is accused of trivializing sexual abuse. He immediately stated that he did not want to adopt the view that was allegedly widespread at the time. But then the words were already in the world.
“Regardless of how you understand the sentence, such a formulation is difficult for those affected to bear,” says Horst Böhm. He is the former President of the Regional Court of Regensburg and Chairman of the Commission that has been in place since May 2021 to investigate and investigate abuse in the Regensburg Diocese. He has spoken to many of those affected, and the pattern is almost always the same: they could not talk to anyone about it, and if they did, violence and abuse were downplayed and downplayed. The Commission is currently in the process of forming the Advisory Board for Affected Persons. “We need those affected as co-decision-makers. If they are injured precisely in this phase, it jeopardizes their participation.”
If a bishop says such sentences, can the church seriously work up the abuse? Shouldn’t the state take care of that? Böhm doesn’t think much of it, the commission is also independent. “No matter what the bishop says about the synodal path, it doesn’t affect our path.” Also, the judiciary cannot, for example, process statute-barred cases. A website is currently under construction so that those affected do not have to go through the diocese but can contact the commission directly. In addition, Böhm wants to commission another external report that will also clarify all cases outside of the Domspatzen complex.
It will take years to record all the deeds, says Böhm, and in the end the question is: “What are the consequences?” For Fritz Wallner, the last chairman of a Regensburg diocesan council, one thing is clear: “The heads have to be replaced.” He can still remember well what it was like with Bishop Müller, when he curtailed the participation of lay people in his diocese. “The effects are still being felt today.” Parish council elections are in March. Wallner, himself a long-time member of his parish council, is not surprised that fewer and fewer believers are standing for election. “For years we’ve been told that we’re not needed anyway.” But the Church does not only consist of priests and bishops.
Nevertheless, it is mainly about these. “For years it has been too little about the victims, but above all about the reputation and the institution of the church,” says Regensburg’s mayor. For example, about the reputation of the emeritus pope. Benedict XVI had written in a statement to the Munich experts that he – then Archbishop of Munich and Freising – had not been present at a crucial Ordinariate meeting when it came to the admission of a pedophile priest in the Archdiocese. The reviewers proved the opposite. Benedikt then explained that a mistake had been made in his statement. The misrepresentation was unintentional. He defended himself against the accusation of lying. Critics accuse him of denying responsibility. It’s been like this for weeks.
So should the city strip the Pope Emeritus of the honorary citizenship that was bestowed on him in 2006? Benedikt and Regensburg share a long history. At the end of the 1960s he taught – at that time still Joseph Ratzinger – for many years as a professor of theology at the local university. His house in Pentling, a suburb of Regensburg, remained his residence in Germany even after the papal election. His brother Georg, the longtime cathedral conductor, lived in the city until his death two years ago. Benedict’s first visit to the city as Pope was a major media event. When Benedikt came again in 2020, unannounced, to see his dying brother one last time, parts of the press hyperventilated. In short: Benedikt is not just anyone in Regensburg. The question of whether he should remain an honorary citizen is all the more painful. “We owe it to the victims that we deal with the issue,” says Mayor Maltz-Schwarzfischer. She asked the city council to take a closer look at it and wanted to do it herself. There is no timetable for when this will be voted on. “You can’t just shake such a decision out of the blue.”
On the home page of Central Bavarian newspaper you can vote on it. As of Friday afternoon: 68 percent of readers are in favor of Benedict remaining an honorary citizen. Fritz Wallner also sees the discussion about the former pope as a sideshow. “We wouldn’t gain anything by taking that away from the old man.” In Wallner’s eyes, the scandal surrounding Benedict, the wave of departures, only shows what has been happening in the diocese for years: “A drifting apart between the church people and bishops like Müller and Voderholzer, who are destroying everything with their elephantism.” However, leaving the Catholic Church would never be an option for him. “This is our church.”