German Catholic Clergy Scandal Gets Closer to the Pope

Hah! His (Pope Benedict) own brother was physically abusing pupils
and of course he was completely unaware of sexual abuse. It makes you sick
just reading about it.

I always wondered why the US had all those issues and Europe seemed immune. I guess it just took longer for the scandals to erupt.

We've been having a trickle of isolated sex abuse cases ever since I'd been reading newspapers. In the nineties, in my studenty circles at the University of Munich, the Catholic clergy was already the, er, butt of many a joke about it. ("What do you get for molestation of altar boys in this parish?" "Well, sometimes a Snickers, sometimes a chewing gum ...") What's new in the current cases is that the victims are coming up en masse all at once and make it a national issue. Good for them!

Well, the Irish scandal is pretty old.
And clergy sexual scandals have rocked Latin America for at least 15 years now.
It's obvious that priests sexually abused children just about everywhere.

And I think a distinction must be made about two different kinds of abuse.
Physical abuse (like slapping children) was relatively common and somewhat admitted socially almost everywhere in those times.
Sexual abuse is waaay another matter.

My bias against Ratkovich is very large re his power as the mover over many decades as a reactionary.
I will of course be for the en masse.

To fb, yes, the slaps, etc. were common in my youth, virtually always directed at boys - although in my own school it was somewhat but not entirely milder.

Nuns slapped the girls...the priests not so much.

So is the difference in the US that people sued the daylights out of the church? Some parishes here are deep financial trouble because of the scandals.

engineer, the main difference is that the US press cared about the US cases, but yes, the US system goes harder into the culprit finances.

Here's a link about one of the big scandals in Mexico. The man makes me puke:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcial_Maciel

osso, I studied with the Jesuits in Mexico, and they were not allowed to hit the children.
The first time I was paddled by an adult was in the USA, Augustinian priests and lay teachers (...and I daydreamed so much that the first one who did it, the math teacher, who was going to Vietnam after the school year, would be POW'ed by the Vietcong over in the jungle... can't imagine what a sexually abused boy must feel).

This is bittersweet, in that I used to like the jesuits of my era and probably still do (one was a wwII submarine captain before he entered), at least the few I knew via my father, and I see they had that good rule. I had dreams of going to med school at St. louis U or Marquette, back in the day.

Ratkovitch was at the heart of some theological wars with Hans Kung around the time I was busy losing my eensy thread to faith or retaining it - he won, I lost all interest.

This will be an odd segue, but interesting to me. Used bookstore queen and mad italophile, I picked up the book Spy in the Vatican by Branko Bokun. I remember news about it (that was a mere blip to me) years before I read it. Very interesting about the author (international red cross in yugoslavia) trying to get through to the pope about various massacres during the war and his running into a wall with Cardinal Montini, later Paul VI. Bokun had a bias, but still, interesting.

Beg pardon, wrong last name - Ratzinger.

so much for loopy ultraconservative ex-senator Rick Santorum's loudly stated theory that clergy sexual abuse was all due to American hippies' hatred of authority and flouting of good old 'Merican values.

Speak of the devil, I mean Rick Santorum -- an exponent of his theory has emerged in Germany as well. It's Walter Mixa, the bishop of Augsburg. Yahoo News has a (German-language) article about him. The core of Mixa's claim lies in this sentence: "Over the last decades, especially in the media, we have witnessed an increasing sexualization of the public discourse, fostering even abnormal sexual inclinations rather than containing them." That's Santorum's point right there.