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Thursday, March 18, 2021
Accusations against Bishop Heße
Expert opinion sees no breach of duty in Woelki
A second report is intended to address cases of abuse in the Diocese of Cologne. The critic, Cardinal Woelki, is exonerated. A current bishop of Hamburg is accused of various breaches of duty.
Criminal lawyer Björn Gercke has charged the current Archbishop of Hamburg, Stefan Heße, with eleven breaches of duty in connection with the processing of allegations of abuse in the Archdiocese of Cologne. Heße was previously vicar general in Cologne. In the case of Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne, Gercke and his team see no breach of duty. Most of the breaches of duty are charged with the late former Archbishop Joachim Cardinal Meisner. That is what Gercke and lawyer Kerstin Stirner said in Cologne when they presented their report.
Gercke and his team found traces of 202 suspects in the report. These are violations of the obligations to inform, report and punish, but also lack of attention to victims and lack of prevention of new acts. It was the first report of its kind in which the names of those responsible were also named without blackening, Gercke said. For this, the ecclesiastical records from 1975 to 2018 were evaluated in recent months.
Most of the victims of sexual assault were children. 63 percent of the accused are clerics, that is, priests. In almost 32 percent of the cases it was sexual abuse, in a good 15 percent it was serious sexual abuse. Gercke classifies the other cases as boundary violations and other sexual misconduct.
Important omissions
Gerke found clear words to deal with past abuse. The evaluation of the files showed, among other things, “that for decades apparently no one has dared to report such cases,” he criticized. It has become particularly apparent that the presentation of suspected cases was “extremely poor for a long time.”
Cardinal Woelki kept a first report from a Munich law firm under lock and key, raising legal concerns. This behavior by Woelki had caused a crisis of confidence in the largest German diocese and led to numerous resignations from the church. The archbishop had already announced that he would announce possible personal consequences following the publication of the report on Tuesday next week.
