VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Supporters of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI came to his defense last week after a report into decades of sexual abuse in his former archdiocese of Munich accused the retired pontiff of covering up and ignoring abuse by Catholic priests.
But some think that the defense of Benedict is less about his legacy and more about the growing polarization of the Catholic Church and its approach to homosexuality and priestly celibacy, issues that both now take center stage in Germany.
“I don’t think the report is going to change people’s minds anyway” about Benedict, said Bill Donohue, longtime president of the Catholic League, a conservative watchdog and church promoter. .
Benedict “is hated by the Catholic left because he was the one who really applied the Scriptures of the Catholic Church as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” Donahue said, referring to the prelate’s tenure during the pontificate of Saint John. Paul II as an enforcer of Catholic dogma, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was granted the title “God’s Rottweiler”.
“The impending schism in Germany is far more serious than that,” said Donahue, who said he was proud to be called “the Rottweiler of the Rottweiler.”
A report of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, published on January 10, revealed that the bishops who oversaw the diocese between 1945 and 2019, including Ratzinger, failed to punish clergy and laity who committed sexual abuse.
Most important to many Catholics, however, is the movement within the wider German Church that has engaged the country’s Catholics in wide-ranging discussions about the most pressing issues facing the institution, including sexual abuse, for almost three years. The ‘synodal path’, as the talks are known, follows a 2018 report that outraged the country’s Catholics when it uncovered more than 37,000 cases of clerical abuse in Germany over a 68-year period, resulting in a mass exodus of the faithful.
The discussions of the Synodal Path ended in early February under the shadow of the Munich revelations. Even after Benedict XVI responded with contrition to the accusations, German Catholics felt “disappointed,” said Claudia Lücking-Michel, vice president of the Central Committee of German Catholics and delegate to the Synodal Path.
While the Synodal Way addresses a wide range of topics facing the local Churchincluding women’s ordination and power structures, the issue of homosexuality “is currently at the very center of public debate,” Lücking said.
The report, she said, “was the last straw that broke the cup.”
While many Germans identify clericalism – the abuse of power by the Catholic clergy – as the main culprit for the church’s systemic failure to respond to sexual abuse, some Catholic conservatives blame the presence of homosexuals in the church.
“We have a gay scandal here, not a pedophilia scandal,” Donohue said. “Clericalism may have something to do with why certain bishops were empowered, but it has nothing to do with why a man would lay his hands on a minor.”
