Pope’s Vicar General scapegoat in abuse scandal?

This video says about itself:

As the Catholic Church struggles to deal with a wave of sex abuse scandals, Simox Cox investigates the Pope’s track record in dealing with paedophile priests. When he was elected, Pope Benedict XVI promised to rid his Church of “filth”, but he now stands accused of covering up abuse and failing to protect children from paedophile priests – the first during his time as Archbishop of Munich and the second while leading the Vatican watchdog responsible for dealing with clerical abuse.

This is Part 2 of the video series on this.

And this is Part 3.

From weekly Der Spiegel in Germany:

04/19/2010

Catholic Abuse Scandal

Was Munich’s Vicar General Forced to Serve as Ratzinger‘s Scapegoat?

By Conny Neumann

Catholic Church officials assigned full responsibility for the reassignment of a known pedophilic priest to retired vicar general Gerhard Gruber who served as deputy to Joseph Ratzinger when he was archbishop. Gruber is now challenging a Church statement that he “acted on his own authority,” a claim he says was never discussed with him.

The emergency plan was hastily assembled in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising on the evening of March 11, a Thursday. The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper had exposed the scandal surrounding pedophile priest Peter H., and the affair over sexual abuse in the church was getting dangerously close to the pope.

Peter H., a vicar from the western German city of Essen who had molested boys on several occasions, was sent to Munich in 1980, where he was assigned to work as a pastor again. As a result, he was able to abuse even more boys. The archbishop and chairman of the diocesan council, which approved H.’s appointment, was Joseph Ratzinger.

Ratzinger also chaired a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, in which the pedophile priest‘s living arrangements and therapy were discussed. He must have been familiar with H.’s criminal past. Because of this, the diocese has, in recent weeks, left no stone unturned in its effort to explain why the current pope could not be held accountable for H.’s continued service in his diocese.

That effort has been supported by documents found in the diocese records office that related to H., and that were signed by someone else at the time: the loyal Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, Ratzinger’s deputy during his time as archbishop.

Apparently no one on the crisis team objected to the idea of taking Pope Benedict XVI “out of the firing line” and using Gruber, 81, as a scapegoat instead. On the morning of March 12, while the press office was busy drafting a statement in which Gruber was given the full blame for H.’s appointment to serve as a pastor, and that included Gruber’s personal apology, a church official was badgering the retired priest on the phone.

But Gruber, who felt put under pressure, later confided in theologian friends. He told them that he had been emphatically “asked” to assume full responsibility for the affair, and that church officials had promptly faxed him a copy of the statement and instructed him to make any changes he deemed necessary.

Vatican promotes bishop who blamed child rape lawsuits on devil: here.