Calls are growing for Berlin to launch a state investigation into clerical sexual abuse in the German Catholic Church after a report accused Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, a former head of the German bishops’ conference, of shielding abusing priests.
In January 2010, confronted with the first evidence of systemic abuse inside the church, Archbishop Zollitsch promised a “complete investigation . . . and no cover-up”.
But a report presented on Tuesday in his southwest archdiocese of Freiburg – the third largest in Germany with 1.8 million Catholics – says Archbishop Zollitsch’s 11-year episcopate until 2013 “distinguished itself with concrete cover-up behaviour”.
After four years of investigations and hundreds of interviews, the authors of the 600-page Freiburg report uncovered 540 victims of clerical sexual abuse and 250 documented abusing priests in the period 1945-2020.
The actual number is likely to be much higher as the diocese claims to have lost many files for the years 1978-2014 during a move to new offices.
The investigators found that Dr Zollitsch, in his 11 years as archbishop until 2013 “ignored codified norms” in canon law for dealing with sexual abuse of minors – and sometimes even disregarded his own diocesan rules.
“In principle, church law had no meaning for him,” the report noted. “He wanted to present himself and his diocese in a good light in Rome and, until the end of his term, refused to pass on relevant cases to Rome.” His approach to the issue continued a tradition of his predecessor Oskar Saier, for whom he served “consensually” as a personnel director for three decades.
The report noted how Archbishop Zollitsch, as head of the bishops’ conference, “repeatedly expressed his sympathy for those affected and their terrible experiences, [but] this made no difference to his decisions or non-decisions, and no change in his approach to accused priests”.
Lead investigator Eugen Endress said the Freiburg files showed a common diocesan approach to disciplining priests.
“If a priest had high-level financial problems, that was noted in writing whereas, when it came to abuse, the pen suddenly ran dry,” he said. “The children, youths and parents affected appear not to have existed for him. He appeared to think his behaviour was the only correct approach, to protect the church.”
While Dr Zollitsch declined to speak to investigators, he issued a statement ahead of the report’s publication acknowledging that “for far too long, my attitude and my actions have been guided far too much by the welfare of the Catholic Church and far too little by sympathy for the suffering of those affected and caring for the victims”.
The latest report commissioned by a Catholic diocese, with familiar claims of sexualised violence by priests and institutional cover-up, has prompted calls for Germany’s federal government to end its hands-off approach to the problem.
“The scale of the cover-up . . . with Dr Zollitsch is of a shocking dimension, even if we are used to quite a bit at this stage,” said Kerstin Claus, the federal government’s commissioner for sexual abuse. “No structure can examine and investigate itself on its own . . . this requires the state to take responsibility.”
