A German bishop gave new details of a sex-abuse scandal at a famous boys’ choir in southern Germany once headed by Pope Benedict XVI’s brother, in remarks published on Saturday.
Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, bishop of Regensburg, where the Domspatzen choir is based, also confirmed previous reports that Benedict’s 86-year-old brother did not head the choir at the time.
The two “remembered” cases of sex abuse at Domspatzen which date back to 1958 and therefore “did not coincide with the period where professor Georg Ratzinger was in charge,” Mueller said in a statement published in the Vatican’s official Osservatore Romano newspaper.
Ratzinger headed the choir between 1964 and 1994, he said.
The director and composer Franz Wittenbrink, a former pupil of the boarding school attached to Domspatzen, spoke of an “ingenious system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure” at the school.
In comments to be published in today’s edition of Der Spiegel news weekly, he accused a former head of the school of “taking two or three boys into his room in the evenings,” giving them wine and masturbating with them.
Wittenbrink told the magazine it was well known what went on at the school, and he “could not understand how the pope’s brother Georg Ratzinger, who was master of the chapel from 1964, could not have been aware.”
The Domspatzen allegations are part of a widening sex scandal rocking Germany’s Roman Catholic Church, which includes allegations of abuse at a number of institutions.
Mueller said the first sex abuse case involving Domspatzen was committed by the vice principal of a primary school that collaborated regularly with the choir.
The man was fired and convicted in the courts, he said.
The second case involved “a person who worked for Domspatzen for seven months” and who was sentenced for sexual abuse 12 years later, Mueller said.
In a letter to parents published on its Web site, the choir acknowledged a child had been abused in the 1950s and a former chorister in the early 1960s had recently told a newspaper he had been sexually molested.
The choir said the principal of the boarding school tied to the choir was convicted in relation to the 1950s events.
But a spokesman for the Regensburg bishopric said on Friday that it had further “information about alleged abuse between 1958 and 1973.”
The allegations in Germany are the latest in a series of scandals to hit the Roman Catholic Church in several countries.
A Vatican statement on Saturday said it wanted to shed “complete light” on all sex abuse cases.
“The Church’s main objective is to render justice to the victims,” added the statement, which was also published in Osservatore Romano.
In separate remarks published on Saturday, top papal advisor Cardinal Walter Kasper said the Church needed to be “seriously” cleaned up.
“I think such a shocking problem ... needs a wider analysis for maybe the whole Church and not just one country,” Kasper told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper.
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