BAVARIAN POLICE have said Pope Benedict’s birthplace was daubed with “insulting” slogans yesterday as the Catholic Church in his homeland faces a growing number of clerical child abuse claims.
Police have refused to reveal what the unknown vandals sprayed on the facade of the three-storey house in the Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn.
They said only that the vandals used blue paint and three words, one of which was “obscene”. The graffiti was painted over immediately yesterday.
“We have no great hope that the perpetrator will be caught,” said Ludwig Raischal, who heads a museum in the house dedicated to the pope that has attracted 100,000 visitors in the last three years.
In 2006 a bust of the pope in the town of Traunstein where he grew up was vandalised with the slogan: “God is to blame for everything.” Yesterday’s attack comes three months after a wave of decades-old clerical child abuse cases came to light in Germany.
Many leading Catholic schools now face allegations of physical and sexual abuse, including Bavaria’s leading Catholic boarding school, Kloster Ettal.
A report issued yesterday says that, for decades, pupils were “brutally mistreated, tormented sadistically and sexually abused” by 15 adults – lay teachers and Benedictine monks.
Munich prosecutors are conducting an ongoing investigation into the school. Local lawyer Thomas Pfister, called in by the school to conduct his own investigation, said he has been contacted by more than 100 former students. Their complaints were mostly of physical abuse, he said, but these claims were “probably only the tip of the iceberg”.
The abuse allegations at Ettal prompted the Archbishop of Munich to force the school’s principal to resign – an unusual step considering the school comes under the auspices of the Benedictine order in Rome.
Yesterday the school’s acting director said the report was a “painful confrontation”.
“This is an important element in our coming to terms with that past,” said Emmeram Walter, promising a plan to assist victims.
The abuse revelations have led to calls in the German media for the pope to address the scandal in his homeland. In an attempt to defuse the row, the pope’s private secretary told Germany’s leading tabloid this week that a papal intervention would “make no sense, nor would it be helpful”.
“No one has [condemned abuse] as strongly as the Holy Father and the Catholic Church,” said Mgr Georg Gänsewein, adding that responsibility for investigating abuse lay with local bishops.
