Cologne –
The Catholic Church, an “irritated system”? That sounds like coaching talk, it is. And means the transfer of what the abuse victim Johanna Beck says of herself to the leadership and the institutional structure of the church: “I fell out of my life. Everything is out of joint, and there is no going back to my old life. ”In a discussion by the Karl Rahner Academy about coming to terms with the abuse scandal, one person is basically unaffected.
Markus Hofmann, Vicar General of Cardinal Rainer Woelki, explains the crisis in the Archdiocese and the uproar among the faithful about how the diocese leadership dealt with the abuse scandal as a result of pioneering acts: “We were very early in the Archdiocese.” The first intervention center, the first Affected Advisory Board, a study to be the first to name those responsible for covering up and playing down abuse. “There was no previous experience,” and mistakes were made. “We had to learn painfully and bitterly, but we also learned,” says Hofmann.
Father Klaus Mertes, who in 2010 made public abuse of the Jesuits’ Canisius College in Berlin for decades and thus triggered a nationwide wave of scandals, contradicts. There were very well findings on which the Cologne diocese leadership could have relied. And victim Johanna Beck also thinks: “There should be a few basics”. There are basic rules for dealing with those affected: Sensitivity, encounter at eye level and above all – no instrumentalization of the victims by the institution and its representatives. “You can’t do that.” In Cologne, on the other hand, “bad things happened” in the way the Archdiocese dealt with the Advisory Board.
The Archdiocese of Cologne cannot deal with abuse itself
Beck, who belongs to the Advisory Board for Affected Bishops of the German Bishops’ Conference, means in particular a declaration by the Archdiocese, which justified the end of an abuse report by the Munich law firm “Westpfahl Spilker Wastl” and the request for a replacement report with the request of those affected. A few days later, several members resigned from the body because they felt they were being ripped off by the archdiocese. Today the advisory board is a rump body.
At the request of moderator Norbert Bauer, the head of the Rahner Academy, the round worked out two basic problems of processing. First: The institution of abusers and cover-ups cannot deal with abuse and cover-up itself. Committees independent of the church and self-organization of those affected are needed. A kind of casting in which bishops choose “their” victims is inappropriate and unworthy.
And secondly: Neither the church leadership nor those affected should succumb to a false addiction to harmony. An attitude “we and the victims together” – nothing is nicer for the accused institution, warned Klaus Mertes. When Cardinal Woelki declared in 2018 that the Advisory Board was helping the Archdiocese to come to terms with it, it shook him, the Jesuit said. “That is not the job of the victims. It is the task of the church to listen to the victims and to respond to their demands. “
Arguments “easy to understand”
Hofmann says he can “understand well” Mertes’ arguments. And Hofmann also admits here that mistakes have occurred. The archbishopric should not have accepted the advisory board’s “offer” for a joint declaration – an offer that, according to Patrick Bauer, the advisory board’s former co-spokesman, never made it.
Hofmann does not have to answer questions about Woelki’s future in the diocese or a resignation that evening. At the end, the academy director Bauer quotes the Salzburg theologian Hans-Joachim Sander: From now on there is no longer any Catholic faith that is unaffected by abuse.
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