The diocese of Limburg has ended the canonical criminal proceedings against a former priest and found that the man, who now lives in Bavaria, sexually abused an underage boy from 1986 to 1993.

The church court expressly stated the severity of the guilt.

The former priest forestalled the release from the clerical state by successfully applying for this step during the procedure.

Bernhard Biener

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung

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The church court also sentenced him to a fine.

He must donate one tenth of his monthly earnings to a non-church charitable organization.

The man could no longer be prosecuted because the crimes were only reported in 2018.

Although the diocese was aware of this in 1997, the head of human resources at the time did not involve the investigating authorities and advised the victim against filing a complaint.

He has since called this a serious mistake.

Normally, the circumstances of such an abuse case are not known.

But the victim mentioned in the verdict, the actor Kai Christian Moritz, made it public three years ago.

The diocese informed him in advance about the judgment, which is legally valid after the objection period has expired.

In an interview with the FAZ, he was now happy that the case was over.

"For me it is important that one can now speak of a convicted perpetrator and no longer of a presumed accused, at least in terms of canon law."

But one thing bothers the 46-year-old man, who is now a member of the advisory board for those affected at the German Bishops' Conference.

Dismissal from the clergy is actually the maximum penalty under canon law.

Due to its own application for the so-called laicization, the church court was no longer able to impose it.

For the victim, this shows a “cowardly attitude on the part of the perpetrator”.

For Moritz, the verdict is good, "because the process is over".

However, the way there was "difficult, tough and rocky".

He called the fact that the process lasted three years, although only three witnesses had to be heard, "underground".

The ecclesiastical court is independent and he doesn't hold that against today's Limburg bishop Georg Bätzing.

"In my case, and I can only speak for him, he did a good job."

After his mother died of cancer, Moritz was taken in by his 30-year-old cousin, a Catholic pastor in central Hesse.

Severe sexual abuse took place there over a period of six years, according to the victim's description, which the judgment of the church court now confirms.

In 1996, Moritz confided in a friend of his deceased mother, a psychologist, who then turned to the diocese.

However, the process was not recorded in the files, and from 1999 to 2010 the priest was employed as a pastor in Eppstein.

Nobody in the community found out about the allegations.

When the abuse study of the dioceses for all of Germany was presented in 2018, Moritz contacted the abuse officer in the diocese of Bamberg, where the priest now lived.

The public prosecutor's office in Marburg had to stop the investigation due to the statute of limitations.

When Bishop Bätzing found out about the case, he spoke to Moritz and commissioned a preliminary canonical investigation, which led to proper canonical proceedings.