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January 21,2022

Anna Murray 

An investigation determined that while archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, former Pope Benedict XVI was aware of priests who assaulted children but did nothing, contradicting Benedict's long-standing denials in a crushing judgment. The report was commissioned by the church itself. According to the findings of an investigation by lawyer Martin Pusch of the Westpfahl Spilker Wastl legal firm into earlier decades of sexual abuse in the Munich Archdiocese, Benedict was aware of the child sexual abuse cases.

The archdiocese commissioned the investigation from legal firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl about two years ago, with the goal of determining whether church officials handled claims correctly between 1945 and 2019. Martin Pusch came to the opinion that the then-archbishop, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, may be accused of misconduct in a total of four cases. According to the new investigation, retired Pope Benedict neglected to take action to prevent cleric abuse.

A church-commissioned assessment released earlier in 2018 found that clergy in Germany assaulted at least 3,677 persons between 1946 and 2014. Nearly a third of the victims were altar boys, and more than half of the victims were 13 or younger. When Benedict, now 94, became the first Pope in centuries to step down in 2013. His pontificate was overshadowed by the Catholic Church's global sexual abuse scandal, and the investigators' findings, which now explicitly tie him in a failure to prevent and punish abuse, threaten to smear the former pontiff's reputation.