The abuse scandal in the Catholic Church will not go unnoticed at the district office in Traunstein either. It’s on Pope Benedict XVI Square, and it doesn’t need its own house number there because its forecourt was once renamed in honor of the pope who likes to call Traunstein his hometown. But now the signs should no longer only stand for themselves and the now former Pope. One would “contextualize our building on Pope Benedict XVI Square and attach QR codes with further information to our building,” announced District Administrator Siegfried Walch (CSU) on Tuesday.
However, Walch is not talking about renaming the square again and is at least orienting himself on the final report that his office published the day before. Because from the point of view of the municipal commission, which should assess whether Benedict is still worthy of all the honors that people in the Traunstein district liked to adorn themselves with until recently, there is “no need for action”.
Whether Benedict, as Josef Ratzinger and as Archbishop of Munich and Freising, reacted consistently enough to allegations of abuse against individual churchmen in the years 1977 to 1982, this question not only concerns the district of Traunstein as a whole. In 2007, the district town also placed a bronze bust of Ratzinger and itself on the town square, which has since divided opinion within the church. Ratzinger has been an honorary citizen of Traunstein since 2005 and of the nearby town of Tittmoning since 2007. There he attended the kindergarten that is now named after him. In 2019, six years after resigning as pope, he was made an honorary citizen of the community of Surberg, where the Ratzingers lived for a while when the young Josef went to school in Traunstein and attended the St. Michael seminary.
The municipality, both cities and the district set up the commission in January, which should draw up guidelines for dealing with all the honors. Shortly before that, the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising had published a report by a law firm that sheds light on the years of abuse of those placed under protection by clerics and how the church leadership is dealing with it. In a first reaction, the Pope Emeritus denied having taken part in a specific meeting dealing with the pedophile priest H. He later corrected this statement.
After his visit to his old homeland in June 2020, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. from Munich Airport from Bavaria back to Italy.
(Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa)
According to its own final report, the Traunstein Commission, which was supposed to “deal with the topic from a historical, legal and theological point of view”, primarily worked on the report and dealt with the various reactions to it and with the legal situation. Investigating acts of abuse or dealing with the victims was “expressly not part of the commission’s work”.
The group, which consists of the district lawyer, the head of the cultural office and an employee of the youth welfare office in the district as well as the regional dean of the Protestant church, a former notary and a voluntary local researcher, has, according to its own statements, based itself on the list of criteria for renaming streets of the German Association of Cities and comes to Conclusion that all the Benedikt kindergartens and places could keep their names just as the respective municipalities could keep their honorary citizen.
According to the Commission, the name would only have to be renamed and revoked “if a substantially changed view of history or significantly new knowledge about an honored personality has arisen”. However, the group does not consider any failures by Archbishop Ratzinger to be serious enough, especially since people like him “are always the subject of social conflicts of interpretation in public and the code of what is recognized as honorable and what is not changes over time”.
In any case, Ratzinger had not been convicted by any court and should therefore be considered innocent. He himself could not be accused of “violations of the rule of law”. “Moral” responsibility, as emphasized in the report, is not enough. One shouldn’t demand a personal admission of guilt from the pope either, since he has acknowledged his “organizational responsibility” for the entire church and its mistakes.
As far as a “historical, political and cultural classification” is concerned, as District Administrator Walch now wants to offer via a QR code for scanning at Pope Benedict XVI Square, the commission advises “technically sound research work” beforehand. Walch politely thanked the commission. Your report stands “for itself and you should definitely take note of it as a neutral evaluation”. The decision on the honorary citizen question now lies with the individual city and municipal councils.