The new report on sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising has triggered a tremor in the Catholic Church and among its members - also in the dioceses of the Rhine-Main region.

The allegations are "continued gravedigging for the Volkskirche," said Frankfurt's city dean, Johannes zu Eltz, on Friday, the day after the report was presented to the public in Munich.

After the quarrels about the sluggish processing in the Archdiocese of Cologne, the "systemic failure" in dealing with victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse was shown again.

Martin Benninghoff

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The Munich report addresses dozens of cases of misconduct by church leaders between 1945 and 2019. We are talking about a total of almost 500 victims and 173 accused priests.

The report is particularly explosive due to the allegations against the retired Pope Benedict XVI, who has been accused of misconduct in four cases and is said to have lied in a written statement.

According to his spokesman, the almost 95-year-old "Papa emeritus" still wants to comment on this.

"Never-ending stream of church resignations"

While the dioceses of Mainz and Fulda did not want to comment on the report on Friday at the request of the FAZ, Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg said: "I am ashamed of this church". The local communities are meanwhile busy with the concrete consequences of this renewed debate. According to a Forsa survey on Wednesday, Germans currently find hardly any other institution as untrustworthy as the Catholic Church. According to this, only twelve percent of Germans have great trust in the church, five years ago it was still 28 percent. In the diocese of Limburg, more than 9,400 people left the church in 2019, around 1,460 more than in the previous record year of 2013.

It's a bloodletting that seems unstoppable. City Dean zu Eltz, who is also the pastor in the Frankfurt Cathedral Parish of St. Bartholomew, laments a "never-ending stream of people leaving the church". His congregation received between 700 and 800 resignation requests a year, a rate of three percent. Younger people in particular, who have started families or are particularly committed to their jobs, do not want to be "connected to an institution that proves to be immobile in a situation that threatens their very existence," says zu Eltz.

The gloomy mood runs, more or less, across the communities, as a non-representative sample on the phone shows.

"I don't doubt my faith," says Jörg Hellmich, a parishioner in the Preungesheim district of Frankfurt.

"But I have doubts about the institution." The extent of the scandals is "simply frightening".

A worker from another parish tells how she spoke to a colleague about this "sad thing" in the morning.

She wondered how "the church could still be defended there".

Many church workers feel helpless and left alone.

The director of the Catholic Academy in Frankfurt, Joachim Valentin, recently pointed out this "toxic mixture" in an interview with the FAZ.

Guidelines are designed to prevent sexual abuse

The pastor of the Frankfurt Saint James parish, Werner Portugall, describes the report as another low point in a series of "avalanches and shocks", especially since it has a "special status" because of the allegations against the former pope and against the Munich Archbishop Reinhard Cardinal Marx “ take.

However, it is also important to appreciate the prevention efforts of the diocese and the communities.

Portugall is getting concrete: His parish is currently developing one of the so-called institutional protection concepts (ISK), which provides for the framework regulation "Prevention against sexualised violence" of the German Bishops' Conference from 2019.

The ISK are specifically formulated guidelines intended to help prevent sexual abuse.

It is intended to regulate questions such as the appropriateness of physical contact, language, choice of words and clothing in church youth work.

Or questions such as what standards apply to overnight stays in community centers, and what must the premises be like so that potential perpetrators cannot even get too close to their potential victims?

Training courses for community officers are also part of the prevention program that the communities run themselves.

The diocese formulates building blocks for this on its website, examines the ISK from a technical point of view and, under certain circumstances, provides information for changes.

The document is finally given to the Parish and Administrative Councils.

In Portugall's community, this should happen in the spring.

However, such efforts at prevention and transparency regularly fall into the blind spot in the public image of the Catholic Church as soon as new expert opinions shed light on the extent of the cases of abuse.

City Dean zu Eltz sees no "big lever" to change that.

Rather, one must "do proper work in the diocese" and, in case of doubt, bring together a "coalition of the willing" with other dioceses in order to advance the necessary reforms and the processing of the cases of abuse.

However, the fact that leading church representatives hesitated to take responsibility and resign is a stumbling block, as expressed by a motto: "I cannot solve the problem of which I am a part myself."