The Catholic Church in Germany is in crisis due to the daily revelations of sexual abuse by priests. Now the pope himself is under attack for his actions, and lack of actions, when he served as Archbishop of Munich. But Pope Benedict still has his fierce defenders in Germany.
The Frankfurt novelist Martin Mosebach, known for is elegant but often grandiose and high-flown prose, has shared his views of the root cause of the crisis in the online magazine The European. The problem, Mosebach says in an interview, is not with the cult of secrecy in the Vatican or priestly celibacy, but rather the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, which attempted to connect the church to realities of the modern world:
Wir müssen uns aber fragen, wieso es in katholischen Internaten gerade in den unmittelbar auf das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil folgenden Jahren gehäuft zu Sexualstraftaten von Priestern gekommen ist. Es führt kein Weg an der bitteren Erkenntnis vorbei: das Experiment des “Aggiornamento”, der Angleichung der Kirche an die säkularisierte Welt, ist auf furchtbare Weise gescheitert. Nach dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil legten die meisten Priester die Priesterkleidung ab, sie hörten auf, täglich die Heilige Messe zu feiern
(We have to ask ourselves why there was an increase in sex crimes by priests in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. There can be no denying that this expericment in Aggiornamento - the assimilation of the church with the secular world - was a colossal failure. After the Second Vatican Council most priests shed their priestly garments and they stopped celebrating the Holy Mass each day.)
Mosebach goes on in the interview to praise the Pius Brothers - a Holocaust-denying christo-fascist sect - as the saviors of the traditional Catholic liturgy.
Like Mosebach, Walter Mixa, the outspoken Bishop of Augsburg, sees the roots in current crisis in the culture of 1960s. But rather than openly attacking Vatican II, Mixa blames priestly pedophilia on the sexual revolution ushered in by the 68ers - a code word in Germany for "dirty hippies". But more recently, Bishop Mixa has cast blame on "atheists" for creating hell on earth. Bishop Mixa really needs to look in mirror, for, according to his former pupils Walter Mixa created his own hell on earth:
Five former residents of the St Josef's home in Bavaria submitted written statements to Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper claiming the Bishop of Augsburg, Walter Mixa, a controversial conservative churchman appointed by the Pope in 2005, used to hit and degrade them during punishment sessions at the home.
In Germany, Hildegard Sedlmayr, 48, a former resident of the home in the Bavarian town of Schrobenhausen, where Bishop Mixa was a priest, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that at age 15, the bishop dragged her from her bed and punched her repeatedly on the arm.
"He grabbed me by the nightshirt, pulled me up out of my bed and punched me repeatedly on the upper arm. Afterwards it was covered in bruises," she said. "The two years at St Josef's were the worst in my life."
Another former St Josef's resident, named as Thomas Huber, said he was in pain for "several days" after Bishop Mixa flogged him. "I was made to bend over a bench, then Mixa hit me 35 times with a carpet beater," he said.
Three other former residents said Bishop Mixa habitually punished children with slaps to the face, punches to the arms, and beatings. The former residents claimed that Catholic nuns who ran the home also hit children with brooms and wooden shoes.
"The children whose parents never visited the home were the ones who were beaten most," said one former resident, named as Markus Tagwerk. "Over the years, Mixa pulled down my trousers and beat me hard on the behind on at least 50 separate occasions," he said.
No doubt, in the eyes of Martin Mosebach, Bishop Mixa was compelled by the reforms of Vatican II to commit these acts of brutality.
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