The public prosecutor’s office and the criminal police have apparently searched the premises of the Archdiocese of Munich as part of investigations into the church abuse scandal. As the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported, the action took place on February 16 in the Ordinariate and in the Archbishop’s Palace. The investigators are said to have followed the rumor that there might be a “poison cabinet” in the archdiocese with sensitive files on abuse cases.
No suspicion of Marx
According to the newspaper, the search found nothing. The ordinariate is the administrative center of the archdiocese, the palace is the archbishop’s official residence. It was said that the judiciary had no suspicion once morest the incumbent Archbishop, Cardinal Reinhard Marx. Rather, it is regarding how the archdiocese dealt with cases of abuse before Marx was in office.
The Archdiocese did not want to comment on the report when asked by BR. In the past, the church leadership had repeatedly stated that it would always release all relevant files on cases of abuse to the investigators.
Prosecutors refer to ongoing investigations
A spokeswoman for the Munich I public prosecutor’s office was reluctant to respond to a BR request: “As usual, we cannot provide any information on ongoing investigations, but we will probably approach the media with information once the investigations are complete.” She pointed out that the Munich I public prosecutor’s office is examining more than 40 cases from the abuse report by the Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) law firm, in which there might be misconduct by church officials.
According to the “SZ”, the formal reason for the search is an investigation to “Case 26” from the abuse report by the law firm WSW. It is regarding how the archdiocese dealt with a priest who was sentenced to five years in prison in the early 1960s. The man, who has since died, was found guilty of 14 counts of molestation, the victims being boys between the ages of 10 and 13. Nevertheless, in the early 2000s, the priest still gave altar boys access to his private sauna and went on vacation with them without sanctions under canon law being imposed on him.
“The rule of law shows the church its teeth”
Observers see the public prosecutor’s action as a political signal. So far, the state has largely left the investigation and investigation of the abuse scandal to the churches themselves.
It was “the first and long overdue search by a public prosecutor’s office with a judicial search warrant,” said canon lawyer Thomas Schüller of the German Press Agency and spoke of a “turning point in the relationship between state judiciary and the churches”. Schüller: “Finally the constitutional state is showing its teeth to the Catholic Church and thus also to the Protestant Church.”
The Bavarian judiciary has been accused from various sides of not punishing cases of abuse in the church decisively enough. Justice Minister Georg Eisenreich (CSU) had also criticized the Munich I public prosecutor’s office in the state parliament. At the end of last year, however, 39 preliminary investigations and six preliminary investigations were ongoing.
The minister spoke out in December in the state parliament for an independent contact point for those affected and emphasized that church reports only play a very minor role in the prosecution of criminal offenses.
With information from KNA, epd, dpa
