The Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) has commissioned the Cremades & Calvo Sotelo law firm to carry out an independent audit of the allegations of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. It is the first time that it happens in Spain, but there are precedents to take note of. The assignment of an investigation to external professionals is the model that the German Church has followed to investigate cases of pederasty within it. The most recent example is that of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which commissioned a Munich law firm, Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, to track down half a century of alleged abuse. The results were known last month and caused an earthquake not only because of the figures —497 victims and at least 235 aggressors between 1945 and 2019—, but also because the lawyers accused a pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, of covering up the attacks when he was at the head of the diocese in the late seventies.
Investigations into abuse by members of the Catholic Church in Germany have been required by either the Bishops’ Conference (DBK) or some of the country’s dioceses, which have also financed them. The longest, commissioned by the bishops’ body, was published in September 2018 and caused great consternation in German society. It emerged that 3,677 children or adolescents were victims of sexual abuse by 1,670 members of the clergy. In this case, the report was not directed by a law firm, but by researchers from three public universities. An interdisciplinary group was created with criminologists and psychologists who worked for four and a half years analyzing documents (38,000) and conducting interviews.
Although the 27 German dioceses provided documents and testimonies to this team, later some of them wanted to investigate in more detail the responsibility of those who had held managerial positions. The diocese of Cologne, the most powerful and wealthiest of the very wealthy German Catholic Church, commissioned its own report shortly after the DBK report became known. The Colon office Gercke Wollschläger was chosen to prepare what is known as “expert opinion”, a report of more than 800 pages whose subtitle reads: “Responsibilities, causes, recommendations for action”. The work is focused on the legal aspects of the Church’s handling of the suspicious activity reports it received between 1975 and 2018, explains lawyer Björn Gercke by email. They did not focus, therefore, “on examining the direct acts of abuse”, but rather on analyzing the processes to later issue “an expert opinion” based essentially on documentation.
Several attorneys and office staff worked full-time for nearly six months with direct access to archdiocese records. “One of the main difficulties was poor archive maintenance, especially for older documents,” says Gercke. Many files did not follow a chronological order, nor were they paginated, so it was difficult to order facts and dates. There were also duplicate documents. And omissions. “With some files we had the impression that documents were missing,” says the lawyer. They also found “numerous” illegible pages – with handwritten notes, abbreviations of names – “which had to be transcribed at great cost.”
The authors Of the report they are aware that they probably missed many suspected cases in the period they analyzed. The archdiocese had destroyed documents – as provided by canon law, the lawyer points out – and did not write summaries of the missing files, something to which it was obliged. “We were not able to determine if there could have been other cases of abuse,” Gercke laments. The work confirmed the existence of at least 314 victims and 202 perpetrators. More than half of the victims were children under the age of 14.
The report cleared Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of any blame, suspected of having wanted to hide the magnitude of the abuses committed in his archdiocese. Woelki had refused to make a first report public citing data protection problems and was widely criticized by other German prelates. In Germany, sexual abuse in the Church has been openly discussed since 2010 and investigations have been carried out, always external and independent, to determine the scope of what has happened in recent decades. Since then the number of apostasies has not stopped growing. The resignations have been especially numerous in the archdiocese of Cologne due to Woelki’s concealment attitude, which has been widely reported by the media.
The investigation into the sexual abuse scandal has led to several resignations, including that of Munich’s Archbishop Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a pillar of the German Catholic Church, last year. The prelate offered his resignation to the Pope through a public letter in which he admitted his “co-responsibility” in the “catastrophe of sexual abuse.” Francis did not accept it, but in his response, also made public by the Vatican, he admitted that “the entire Church is in crisis.”
The analysis of the documentation in the Cologne case was completed with interviews with “all those living responsible” who held positions in the Archdiocese between 1975 and 2018 and about whom there was some suspicion of malpractice, explains Gercke. For this report—similar to external surveys carried out in companies to determine what went wrong, whose fault it is, and how to prevent it from happening again—the lawyers did not interview the alleged abusers. Neither did the victims, but they did receive suggestions from the archdiocese’s victims’ advisory council and had conversations with some of those affected. Although it was not the objective, says Gercke, they also wanted to have the direct perspective of those affected.
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