On Thursday, the Christ Bearer Brotherhood published a 99-page report on years of sexual, spiritual and power abuse in the Protestant community. The first prior, Otto Friedrich, is said to have sexually abused his fellow brothers for decades, some of them severely. Other brothers, some of whom he abused, later became perpetrators themselves. The allegations were known to the community for more than 25 years. Brother Christian Hauter explained that they remained silent for so long out of fear and shame and because they were shocked by the actions. The Triefenstein monastery on the Main has been the home of the Christ Bearer Brotherhood since 1986
Two years ago, the Christ Bearers said they decided to undertake an external review of their history on this topic. They set up a so-called trace group that has looked at documents and had many conversations with current and former brothers over the past few months. Their verdict: What happened largely as a result of Prior Otto, who died in 2018, “can only be understood as a ‘system of abuse’,” says the report, which is also available on the Internet. One of Friedrich’s victims of abuse was still a minor at the time of the crime, it was said.
The four-person tracking group consisted of the former judge Christa Dreiseitel, the psychotherapists Ilse Hellmann and Sebastian Küffner and the former Leipzig superintendent Martin Henker. They invited 29 brothers who had left and 22 current brothers to talk about their experiences in the brotherhood – conversations were held with 13 of them, two responded in writing and three stated that they had no need to talk. The others did not respond to the request. Christian Hauter, who was prior himself between 2005 and 2020, acted as contact person between the track group and the brotherhood.
The trace group assumes that the founding prior committed suicide against at least eight confreres between 1963 and 1995. It almost always involved non-consensual homosexual acts between men, often combined with spiritual acts such as confession. Three brothers, some of whom were themselves victims of Friedrich’s abuse, become perpetrators – most recently in 2019. This time non-brothers are also affected. There does not appear to be any serious abuse in these cases, the report says. In all cases, reports or self-disclosures were filed, but all of them were discontinued without results.
The acts of abuse had been an “open secret” since 1996 at the latest.
At the latest after Friedrich was removed as prior and left the brotherhood in 1996, the acts of abuse within the Christ Bearer community were an “open secret”. The track group sharply criticized this in its report. According to the verdict, this “can only be perceived from the perspective of the victims as a refusal to come to terms with what happened.” In a letter to the Circle of Friends of Christ Bearers on the subject, also published on Thursday, it is said that they were ashamed of what had happened and therefore remained silent for years: “Today we know that was a mistake.”
Brother Christian Hauter said that he was critical of the authoritarian structures in the community’s first decades when he joined at the beginning of the 1990s. Because at that time not only Otto Friedrich, but also other older brothers supported this system, he accepted it. He was unaware that there was sexual abuse in the brotherhood. “Sexuality is now also not the core competency of men living in a celibate community,” he said. Ultimately, all Christ-bearer brothers fell victim to an impostor in the person of Otto Friedrich.
The Christ Bearers have been around since the early 1960s. The community has its roots in southern Hesse – as does the Christ-Bearer Sisterhood from Offenbach. At that time, young adults lived together in a kind of Christian community in Bensheim-Auerbach (Bergstrasse district), played Christian pop and rock music and were socially active. In 1961 an association was founded, from which the now separate brotherhood and sisterhood emerged.