By IRNA,
Berlin : Germany’s Catholic church is faced with its worst crisis since World War II in the wake of widening allegations of child sexual abuse by priests.
Since January, around 300 former Catholic students have come forward with claims of clerical sex abuse, many going back to the 1950s and 1960s.
A hotline set up recently by the Catholic Church in Germany to counsel victims of sexual abuse was jammed on its first day, with nearly 4,500 calls.
At least two priests have been suspended but many cannot be taken to the criminal courts because of the statute of limitations as victims must contact police within 10 years of their 18th birthday.
The revelations have even dragged Pope Benedict XVI into the affair as he has been linked directly and indirectly to the sex scandal in Germany’s Catholic church.
Several institutions where sexual abuse or harassment took place are in the south German state of Bavaria and well-known to the 82-year-old pontiff when he was Archbishop of Munich.
His proximity to the crime scene has rattled the German church leadership.
So far the only direct link between the Pope and the child abuse cases is Father Peter Hullermann.
After being caught making sexual advances to teenagers in the west German city of Essen, Father Hullermann was relocated in 1980 to Munich, where Joseph Ratzinger was Archbishop.
The future Pope gave green light to Hullermann’s transfer on condition that he received weekly therapy — but he was also employed at a Munich parish which allowed him regular contact with children.
In 1986, he received a suspended prison term for sexually abusing children again.
The scandal has also affected the Pope’s overall leadership as only 31 percent of Germans still support him.
Reacting to the deepening crisis, a Green Party politician and member of the Central Committee of German Catholics, Christa Nickels, labeled it the “greatest loss of confidence in the Catholic church since the time of Adolf Hitler.”
Fearing an imminent mass church exodus of its followers, Germany’s Catholic leaders tried to use the traditional Easter sermons to call for a new beginning however that strategy backfired after the Pope made no reference of the scandal during his Easter mass at the Vatican.
To make matters even worse, the pontiff received the public Easter greeting from the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano who in an unprecedented move, showed his support for the embattled Pope.
Then the cardinal, who is a former Vatican secretary of state, referred to criticism levelled at Benedict for the handling of the sexual abuse affair as merely being “yakety-yak.”
Critics of the Catholic church argue that failure to seriously and thoroughly address the sex scandal will hurt the church in the long run and further damage its reputation among German Catholics.