It is unknown whether the cardinal recognized him. Send your thoughts and reactions to Letters to the Editor. Learn more here. Join now. New questions raised about Cardinal Ratzinger and abusive priest Feb 20, Peter's Basilica at the Vatican Feb.
Enter your email address to receive free newsletters from NCR. Email address. Join the Conversation Send your thoughts and reactions to Letters to the Editor. The attorney, Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the Diocese of Regensburg to conduct the inquiry, said that there were fifty credible cases of sexual abuse, along with a larger number of cases of other forms of physical abuse, from beatings to food deprivation.
The news received widespread attention not only because of its disturbing content but because the director of the Regensburg boys' choir from to was Georg Ratzinger, the older brother of Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger was the Archbishop of Munich from until , when he went to head up the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which establishes theological orthodoxy and was also one of the branches of the Church that dealt with priestly sexual abuse.
The developments in Germany raised the question of what the two Ratzinger brothers knew about the abuse in the Regensburg choir. Most of the sexual abuse took place, apparently, at a boarding school for elementary-grade students connected to the choir. At that time, Georg Ratzinger, who was on the three-person supervisory board of the elementary school, acknowledged that some choirboys had complained about the punishments they received at the school.
In fact, accusations of abuse surfaced and were investigated in , but no one saw fit to remove Meier from his post until the year of his death. When asked at his press conference last week whether Georg Ratzinger had been aware of the abuse, Weber replied, "Based on my research, I must assume so. Georg Ratzinger has said that he routinely slapped choirboys when their performance was not up to snuff, standard treatment until Germany banned corporal punishment, in the early eighties.
So far, the Regensburg diocese has offered compensation of twenty-five hundred euros for each victim. In the early nineties, a monk who worked at the Vatican told me, "You wouldn't believe the amounts of money the church is spending to settle these priestly sexual-abuse cases. He was the first diocesan priest in 80 years to assume the pastoral governance of the great Bavarian Archdiocese. Even if I used different approaches, I have always followed the truth and I have always been at its service.
On the other hand I chose that motto because today the idea of truth is hidden, almost as something too great for mankind; but everything collapses if truth is missing. On 15 th February he renounced to the pastoral governance of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising. He was the President of the Preparatory Commission for the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which presented the new Catechism to the Pope after six years of work Benedict remembers the region of his childhood as Mozartian.
He is the youngest of three children of a family of modest means. His sister Maria and his brother Georg are only a couple of years older. All three Ratzinger children will later devote their lives to the Catholic Church and will become astonishingly successful. The baby is baptized still on the same day with Easter water — the connection of his birth to Easter will have a special meaning to Joseph throughout his life.
The house of his birth in Marktl am Inn, still stands today and is the center of a pilgrimage-like tourism to this Bavarian rural town nowadays. The Ratzingers descend from a long line of Bavarian farmers of modest resources. His father left the farming tradition and became a policeman. His mother worked as a cook in Bavarian hotels before her marriage.
Little Joseph visits the kindergarten connected to the Augustine monastery. Most Bavarian schools were confessional. Bavaria is a catholic region, while northern Germany is Lutheran. Germany was literally divided into two religions after the Thirty Years War in Beginning of the 20th century, more and more Bavarians were catholic by birth only. The Ratzingers, however, were a truly Christian family with deep roots in catholic tradition. Young Joseph experienced hostility, repression and violence against the Church.
He saw how some Nazis beat the Parish Priest before the celebration of Mass. When Joseph was ten, the family settles in Hufschlag near Traunstein, only 22 miles from Salzburg. At that time it is already obvious to the family and the teachers that Joseph is academically highly gifted and inclined to priesthood. Despite financial hardship the parents send both of their gifted sons to the Gymnasium, the rigorous German prep school.
In , the year Hitler started the Second World War, Joseph changed to the prestigious prep school for future clergy St. Michael in Traunstein. In the Nazis tried to weaken the position of the Catholic Church in the traditionally catholic states of the German Reich.
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