Germany’s Roman Catholic Church is expanding its search for pedophile priests back to 1945, probing diocese records to discover early-warning signs of sexual abuse and help prevent new cases.
The German Bishops’ Conference has commissioned separate investigations by a crime researcher and a team of psychiatrists to compile cases, profile perpetrators and review its guidelines for prevention, according to a statement on the group’s website.
“We want to track down the truth that may be lurking undiscovered in the records from past decades,” the group quoted Bishop Stephan Ackermann, the German church’s envoy for investigation of sex abuse, as saying yesterday in Bonn. “We want to learn still more, including for prevention.”
A wave of allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests emerged in Germany last year, beginning at an elite Jesuit high school in Berlin. The head of the bishops’ conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, apologized to more than 100 pedophilia victims in February 2010 after German-born Pope Benedict XVI called such abuse a “heinous crime.”