In the diocese of Münster, too, priests who abused the law were systematically withdrawn from criminal prosecution by secular or ecclesiastical authorities.

As a research group reported on Monday in the Westphalian episcopal city after analyzing all available files and talking to several dozen people affected and to those responsible for human resources, many more attacks could have been prevented simply by bishops and other superiors dealing with the accused in accordance with the provisions of canon law .

However, in order not to show the church as an institution in a bad light, more than 90 percent of the accused were deliberately taken “out of the line of fire” until recently.

Daniel Deckers

responsible for “The Present” in the political editorial department.

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The scientists around the historians Thomas Größbölting (Hamburg) and Hermann-Josef Große-Kracht (Münster), who worked on behalf of the University of Münster but were financed by the diocese, did not only look at cases in the investigation period from 1945 to 2020 encountered in which priests were transferred, be it to another parish, be it to another part of the diocese, be it abroad.

Approximately a quarter of the clergy who were on record to have engaged in violence during the period in question were able to remain in their congregations.

Report refutes claim by Benedict XVI.

Großbölting commented on this circumstance with the words that cover-up does not only begin in the Vicariate General, but is also widespread among lay people.

Accordingly, the scientists have repeatedly identified constellations in which members of a congregation were informed about the activities of their clergyman without sharing this knowledge with those responsible in the church or involving the judiciary.

All in all, the researchers were able to identify 183 or a good four percent of the diocesan priests as accused in the period in question.

610 affected children or adolescents could be assigned to them, three quarters of them were boys in pre-puberty.

The chronological distribution of the crimes also shows the usual pattern in Münster.

There, too, the number of first offenses has been falling since the 1960s and thus before the sexual revolution.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

two years ago claimed that abuse was a consequence of "1968".

How many perpetrators remained unidentified during the period of investigation cannot be determined exactly using historiographical means.

According to the scientists, the number of people affected is in reality at least 5,000, which would be more than eight times as many as known.

In any case, it was never an “individual case”, as Bishop Reinhard Lettmann of Münster wanted the public to believe back in 2002.

According to the findings of the researchers, every bishop from Michael Keller to Joseph Höffner and Heinrich Tenhumberg to Reinhard Lettmann was confronted with a large number of accusations, at least during conversations.

By the year 2000, about a hundred abused priests had been recorded.

Until the first guidelines for dealing with cases of sexual abuse came into force in 2002, those affected were mostly ignored by the diocese leadership, sometimes even silenced.

Personnel managers generally had nothing to fear from therapists, who have regularly dealt with suspects since the 1970s, nor from public prosecutors or judges.

Felix Genn, who has been Bishop of Münster since 2008, was attested by the scientists to have had a relatively flat learning curve at first.

Even during his tenure, some cases were not reported to Rome, as required by canon law.

However, the researchers had little or nothing to complain about in the diocese's internal processing of the cases and the cooperation with the judiciary.