It is not a good sign that this position has not yet been filled: The independent commissioner for child sexual abuse issues, Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, resigned from his post on February 28 without it being clear who would succeed him – a symptom of the Laziness with which the state has so far exercised its guardianship to protect affected children and young people, regardless of whether the crime scenes are church, sports or family.
In a position paper, Rörig reproaches politicians for their reluctance to deal with this issue, which calls for legally regulated intervention by the state, in such a way that state law for processing takes precedence over church law.
This affects, for example, state access to personnel files and archives, an access that cannot be replaced by church commissioned work.
You can see where the avalanche of abuse reports in the dioceses has led since 2010: to the same affirmations of shame and shock, the ritual of communal responsibility, to the staging of a cultural relativistic learning story in which the "we" replaces the "I". .
The scandalous moment
For his attempt to make politics more responsible, Rörig can fall back on a pointed statement by the Protestant theologian Notger Slenczka.
As misleading as his suggestion in 2013 was to remove the Hebrew Bible from the Christian canon, since the Old Testament was supposedly only addressed to the people of Israel, his most recent contribution to the abuse debate appears to be clarifying.
In the online publication “Zeitzeichen.
Evangelical Comments on Religion and Society” of February 14, Slenczka reminds us that church criminal acts are fundamentally part of penitential proceedings.
However, this aims “in addition to making reparations to the victims, the repentance and improvement of the perpetrator – and thus forgiveness.
In this sense, it is also (!) oriented towards the perpetrator”.
It is this specifically religious form of distinguishing between crime and perpetrator in the sign of forgiveness that suggests state aid in order, as the author understands it, not to allow the risk of a possible double bind between pastoral and constitutional duties to arise in the first place.
Of course, with or without the state, it is about “that a pastor absolutely does not agree to the actions of the perpetrators in cases of abuse and does not downplay it”.
All the more complex is the pastoral task of not treating the perpetrator as a hopeless case, not writing him off: "The Gospels portray Jesus of Nazareth as the one who also turns to the perpetrators and thus to the people who have rightly fallen victim to our general contempt .” A speech hard to take in the face of abuse.