Catholic Child Abuse News - Suffer Little German Children, Sold By Nuns to Paedophiles

Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki.
Refusing to publish the report into the sexual abuse of children by Catholic nuns and priests in his archdioces.

Child abuse in the Catholic Church — a scandalous approach to scandal  | Germany| News and in-depth reporting from Berlin and beyond | DW | 25.11.2020

We're used to stories of the sexual exploitation and abuse of children by Catholic nuns, what with the Irish Mother and Bay Homes scandal and reports of Spanish nuns selling new-born babies and telling their single mothers their baby had died, that it comes as little surprise that a scandal has been uncovered in Germany, involving nuns and priest selling orphaned children for sexual exploitation in the Archdiocese of Cologne.

This scandal has come to light as a result of a lawsuit brought by some of the victims.

The lawsuit alleges that boys living in the boarding houses of the Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer were sold or loaned for weeks at a time to predatory priests and businessmen in a sick rape trade. The boys were denied the chance of being adopted or fostered out to families because selling them or hiring them out for sex orgies was more lucrative.

The lawsuit, first reported by Deutsche Welle last year, was led by 63 year-old victim Karl Haucke. With 15 other former orphans, he demanded the Archdiocese of Cologne carry out a full investigation. This investigation was concluded in January 2021, but suppressed by Archbishop Reiner Maria Woelki because he considered the details too horrific. It will only be shown to journalists who first sign a confidentiality agreement.

According to this report at the time of the allegations, in Deutsche Welle, referring to Karl Haucke:

...the abuse was not just of a physical, sexual nature. The priest made him relate the stories during the weekly confession. "Confession includes penance. Depending on the abuser’s mood, he might say 'I’ll come around to your bed tonight or tomorrow.' Then it would start all over again."

I could not achieve closure with the man who abused me because he died in the 1980s. But I am still waiting for the public acknowledgment of guilt by the institution that employed this perpetrator, that stood idly by, that gave him the necessary infrastructure to commit all these crimes. I still hold out hope of achieving closure with this institution.

Karl Haucke

Hauke says he suppressed the memory of the abuses. As an adult, he became a workaholic, and suffered from symptoms of PTSD in later life, until his memory was jogged by a major scandal involving the sexual abuse of children by Jesuit priests that broke in 2010 and revealed that thousands of children had been sexually abused in Catholic Church institutions, prompting the German government to set up an enquiry under an independent commissioner.

According to this report in The Daily Beast:

Haucke says he was abused at least once a week between the ages of 11 and 14, often by more than one priest. “We had no words to describe what was being done to us. Nor did we know what it meant. And it did not stop at physical pain. We had a clear sense of humiliation and being used,” he told Deutsche Welle when the report was due to be released. He called the stifling of the report's release in January “scandalous” and said that denying the journalists the right to publish the report was “like being abused all over again.”

Now, several lawyers with access to the 560-page report have shared segments with news outlets, including The Daily Beast. The report names various German businessmen and complicit clergy who “rented” the young boys from the nuns who ran a convent in Speyer, Germany between the 1960s and 1970s. Among the worst instances of abuse were gang bangs and orgies the young boys were forced to participate in before being returned to the convent where the nuns would then punish them for wrinkling their clothing or being covered in semen.

The report finds that 175 people, mostly boys between the ages of 8 and 14, were abused over two decades. But it failed to blame the nuns directly, instead saying “systematic” management errors and “leniency” for those who were accused by the children enabled the abuse to continue.
[...]

The lawsuit also spawned a survey within religious orders that found that 1,412 people who lived in or frequented convents, parishes, and monasteries were abused as children, teenagers, and wards by at least 654 monks, nuns, and other members of the orders. Around 80 percent of the victims surveyed were male and 20 percent female. The survey also found that 80 percent of the abusers are now dead, and 37 had left the priesthood or religious order.

The Archdiocese of Cologne told The Daily Beast in a statement that the reason the report was not published was that it failed to fully explain the methodology of the research, but Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesmann, who now leads the archdiocese, said that the abuse report was “so gory” it would be too shocking to make public. Wiesemann told the Catholic News Agency KNA that after reading it he had to take a month's sabbatical to recover. “I too have limited energy for the burdens I have to carry,” he said.

The archdiocese of Cologne has announced that there will be an entirely new investigation.

This not the first time that Woelki has been involved in a sexual abuse cover-up. Deutsche Welle is now reporting that the Cardinal has referred himself to the Pope for investigation over his failure to report sexual abuse allegations, not those in this case, but those involving a priest in Düsseldorf who died in 2017 with whom Woelki worked when he was younger, as a deacon.

In 2010, a victim contacted the archdiocese of Cologne, saying the priest sexually abused him while he was a child in the late 1970s. Although the victim was paid €15,000 in compensation in 2011, it was not until 2015 that Woelki reviewed his personnel file and decided to take no action against the priest.

Under the Catholic Church's canon law, reports of such allegations must be sent to the Vatican, but once again the familiar old cover-up machinery was rolled out to protect the reputation of the priest and the Church, with little regard to the welfare of his victims, past or future.

Separately, the Bishop of Münster, Felix Genn, is also reviewing whether a church investigation should be launched against Cardinal Woelki, who remains a cardinal in good canonnical standing as the saying goes. As such he is in a position to take part in any convocation to choose a new Pope, should the need arise.

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