Top German Catholic bishop resigns over sexual abuse ‘catastrophe’

Munich (dpa) – The German Catholic Church has been rocked by a fresh crisis following the resignation of one of its most influential bishops over the Church’s sexual abuse scandal.

“My impression is that we are at a dead-end,” Cardinal Reinhard Marx wrote to the pope in a letter released on Friday, adding that he hoped that the situation could mark a turning point.

“In essence, it is important to me to share the responsibility for the catastrophe of the sexual abuse by church officials over the past decades,” said Marx, who has been a bishop for about 25 years.

“Marx is not just anyone,” Father Bernd Hagenkord, a church figure in Rome told dpa, saying his resignation offer will have repercussions around the world.

A former head of the German Catholic Church through his role as president of Germany Bishops’ Conference, Marx, 67, is one of the nation’s most influential church leaders.

With about 2.3 million members, the German Catholic Church is one of the wealthiest in the world and to some extent one of its most liberal.

Marx, the bishop of Munich, is also known as a leading advocate of reform and having called on the church to adopt a more tolerant stance on same-sex marriages as well as accepting women into its higher ranks.

In his letter, Marx said the investigations and expert reports over the past 10 years consistently showed that there had been “a lot of personal failure and administrative errors,” but “also institutional or systemic failure.”

A 2018 study commissioned by the German Bishops’ Conference under Marx found that 1,670 members of the clergy had committed some type of sexual assault against 3,677 minors, mostly boys, in the nation between 1946 and 2014.

Marx’s letter, which was sent to the pope nearly a fortnight ago but only made public on Friday, calls for “a new beginning, for a new awakening of the church, not only in Germany.”

His resignation offer came after the pope last month stepped into the scandal that has engulfed the Catholic Church in Cologne by ordering a review of the west German city’s handling of a sex abuse scandal.

The pope plans to dispatch a so-called apostolic visitation to Germany’s largest diocese this month to investigate “possible errors” carried out by Cologne Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki in handling the claims of sexual misconduct by priests.

Marx described in a newspaper interview released last year the decision not to release a probe into clergy sexual abuse undertaken by the Cologne Archdiocese as “devastating” for the entire Catholic Church.

An expert report on cases of sexual abuse in Marx’s Munich and Freising archdiocese is expected to be completed in the coming months.

The probe focused on how sexual abuse by priests in the diocese was possible and whether high-ranking clergy protected perpetrators.

Marx told the pope he had repeatedly considered resigning from office in recent months.

“Without doubt, these are times of crisis for the church in Germany,” he wrote. “However, this crisis has also been caused by our own failure, by our own guilt.”

In asking the pope to accept his resignation, Marx wrote: “Since last year, I have thought about this more thoroughly and have asked myself what this means for me personally.”

Marx has been asked to continue his work as a bishop until a decision is made on his resignation.