Status: 04/18/2023 04:19 am
With a report, the Archdiocese of Freiburg wants to reveal structures that have favored sexualized violence and its cover-up. The former archbishop should receive special attention.
The Freiburg Report is the ninth comprehensive and independent study by German dioceses on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The study, which was originally supposed to be published in October, uses case studies to show how and why sexualized violence and its cover-up by clerics occurred.
According to the Archbishop’s Ordinariate, the focus of the investigation is that “those responsible are clearly named” – specifically, these are the bishops, the vicar generals as heads of administration and the officials as heads of the church court.
Unrestricted access to personnel files
The report, which is said to be around 600 pages long, was drawn up by the “Document Analysis Working Group”. Behind this bureaucratic-sounding term is a group of four external experts from the judiciary and criminal police who have had unrestricted access to the archdiocese’s personnel files since 1945 since 2019. In addition, they evaluated about 1,000 minutes of the diocesan leadership group and interviewed 180 people.
The nationwide MHG study, which was carried out in autumn 2018, mentioned 190 suspects – mostly priests – and at least 442 people affected.
Special attention to Zollitsch
In addition to the two deceased archbishops Hermann Schäufele (1958 – 1977) and Oskar Saier (1978 – 2002), the focus of the investigation is likely to be the still living Archbishop Emeritus Robert Zollitsch (2003 – 2013), who was also chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference from 2008 to 2014 .
The public prosecutor’s office in Konstanz had investigated Zollitsch in 2010 on allegations of complicity in a case of abuse in the archdiocese. Last fall he published a personal statement on how to deal with sexualised violence. It is entitled: “I expressly admit my guilt.”
Zollitsch moved from Freiburg to Mannheim a few weeks ago. In a press statement yesterday, he said he would not comment on today’s report.
Clear benchmark
In connection with Zollitsch, the incumbent Archbishop Stephan Burger should also be looked at. He was an archbishop’s official under his predecessor and, according to his own statements, has no contact with him at the moment.
Burger has also been the deputy abuse commissioner for the German Bishops’ Conference since last September. At the beginning of the year, he stated unequivocally that dealing with the abuse scandal was personally important to him: “Anyone who is guilty must take responsibility – regardless of post and position.”
So far, the dioceses of Cologne, Aachen, Limburg, Munich, Münster, Essen, Berlin and Mainz have presented final studies on sexualized violence.