Official residence of Cardinal Marx raided by investigators on search for concealed documents
Investigators apparently search Cardinal Marx's official residence
In the Catholic Church abuse scandal, the public prosecutor's office has obtained a search warrant against the Munich Archdiocese, according to the SZ. Apparently nothing was found, but observers see the action as a political signal.
The public prosecutor's office and the criminal police have apparently searched premises of the Archdiocese of Munich as part of investigations into the church abuse scandal. As reported by the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", the action took place on 16 February at the Ordinariate and the Archbishop's Palace. In the process, the investigators are said to have looked into the rumour that there could be a "poison cabinet" in the Archdiocese with sensitive files on abuse cases.
No suspicion against Marx
According to the newspaper, however, nothing was found during the search. The ordinariate is the administrative centre of the archdiocese, the palace is the office and residence of the archbishop. No suspicion of the judiciary was directed against the acting archbishop, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, it said. Rather, it was about the archdiocese's handling of abuse cases before Marx's term of office.
The archdiocese did not want to comment on the report when asked by BR. In the past, the church leadership had repeatedly declared that it would always hand over all relevant files on abuse cases to investigators.
Public prosecutor's office refers to ongoing investigations
A spokeswoman for the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office I was cautious when asked by BR: "As usual, we cannot give any information on ongoing investigations, but we will probably approach the media with information when the investigations are completed." She pointed out that the Munich I Public Prosecutor's Office is examining more than 40 cases from the abuse report by the law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW), in which there could be misconduct by church officials.
According to the SZ, the formal reason for the search is the investigation of "Case 26" from the abuse report of the WSW law firm. The report deals with the Archdiocese's handling of a priest who was sentenced to five years in prison in the early 1960s. According to the report, the man, who has since died, was guilty of abuse in 14 cases, the victims were boys aged between ten and 13. Nevertheless, the priest had still allowed altar boys access to his private sauna at the beginning of the 2000s and had gone on holiday with them without any sanctions being imposed on him under canon law.
Canon lawyer: "The rule of law shows the church its teeth".
Observers see the action of the public prosecutor's office as a political signal. So far, the state has largely left the processing and clarification of the abuse scandal to the churches themselves.
It is "the first and long overdue search by a public prosecutor's office with a judicial search warrant", said Thomas Schüller, an expert in church law, to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur and spoke of a "turning point in the relationship between state justice and the churches". Schüller: "Finally the constitutional state is showing its teeth to the Catholic Church and thus also to the Protestant Church." The judiciary in the Free State of Bavaria is setting an example to all the federal states and demonstrating that "the grace period for the churches is over when it comes to suspicions of serious sexual offences. The churches are not a state within the state, have no special rights and must be treated like everyone else," the church law expert emphasised.
The Bavarian judiciary has been accused from various sides of not punishing cases of abuse in the church decisively enough. Justice Minister Georg Eisenreich (CSU) had also criticised the Munich I public prosecutor's office in the state parliament. At the end of last year, however, 39 preliminary investigations and six investigations were underway.
The Minister had last spoken out in December in the state parliament in favour of an independent contact point for those affected and emphasised that church reports only played a very subordinate role in the prosecution of criminal offences.
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