Bishop regrets Church’s inaction on abuse

Church in the World
31 May 2008
Germany

Bishop regrets Church’s inaction on abuse

Christa Pongratz-Lippitt


SEXUAL ABUSE by priests must be talked about openly and "tackled unsparingly", a German bishop has said at a workshop at the 97th Katholikentag, a five-day lay Catholic festival at Osnabrück attended by 60,000 people.

Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke of Hamburg said paedophile priests should not be moved from parish to parish but should be suspended. "The Church should be particularly ashamed when it is guilty in such situations because of the high moral pedestal on which it stands," Bishop Jaschke said after listening to the story of a victim who had been abused for years by a priest. The German Church had reacted far too late and the bishops had not issued guidelines on the subject until 2002, said Bishop Jaschke. He said in the archdiocese of Hamburg the Church was now cooperating closely with the police and the prosecutor's office.

Also at the Katholikentag were the new president of the German bishops' conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, and the chairman of the General Conference of Rabbis, Henry G. Brandt, who called for more intensive dialogue between Christians and Jews.

Several prominent Jewish personalities boycotted the Katholikentag because of the revised Tridentine rite Good Friday prayer issued in February, which called for the Jews to recognise Jesus as the Christ and has disrupted Christian-Jewish dialogue in Germany and Austria since then.