Vatican rises to Benedict XVI’s defense after Munich abuse report
After a damaging report on clergy sexual abuse in the archdiocese headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican on January 26 defended the emeritus pope, advising against seeking “easy scapegoats and summary judgments.”
In an editorial published in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, the editorial director of the Vatican’s communication department, Andrea Tornielli, pushed back against a wave of criticism spurred by the publication of a report commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising in Germany to investigate cases of abuse from 1945 to 2019.
The report, published January 20, found that 497 people in the archdiocese have been abused by clergy and that three archbishops who oversaw the diocese in that time frame failed to prevent cases of abuse or to punish those responsible.
