On the 17th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Catholic archbishop Georg Gänswein described the sexual abuse cases as September 11th of the Catholic Church. The archbishop, prefect and secretary of the emeritus Pope Benedict XVI addressed the abuse scandal in the presentation of the book by Rod Dreher "The Benedict Option - A Strategy for Christians in a post-Christian society".
The US author had moved from the Catholic to the Orthodox Church in 2006 for lightning cases of abuse. In his speech, Gänswein now referred to today's date and said that "even the Catholic Church must look with horror on its own 'Nine / Eleven', even if this disaster, unfortunately, not only with a date, but with many days and years and with countless victims. " However, he does not want to compare the victims of abuse of the Catholic Church with the almost 3,000 "innocent people" who died in the 2001 terrorist attack.
"The recent news from America about how many souls have been terminally and mortally wounded by Catholic Church priests gives a worse message, as if all of Pennsylvania's churches had suddenly collapsed," Gänswein continued.
In August, a Pennsylvania grand jury final report showed that at least a thousand children in the US state were allegedly sexually abused and raped by more than 300 Catholic priests. For decades, cases of abuse in the Catholic Church have been repeatedly exposed worldwide.