Bishop denounces smear campaign against the Church

The Bishop of Regensburg, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, in his  Sunday sermon denounced parts of the reporting into child abuse in church institutions as evidence of prejudice and anti-clerical agitation. Mueller, who is responsible within the Catholic German Bishops' Conference for Ecumenism and is valued highly by the Pope, dismissed the allegation of a systematic cover-up by leaders of the church of attacks. He condemned the attempt to bring into disrepute the entire Catholic Church and its institutions.

Mueller  alleged that anti-clerically minded forces have chosen the Regensburg cathedral choir as a victim: "A showpiece of the Diocese of Regensburg is being dragged through the mud." Criminal energy is being used to produce  deliberately distorted images. Meanwhile, the mood was so heated that Domspatzen (the choir of the Cathedral) were being publically mobbed. Reporters besieged their high school and troubled parents, because they did  not free their children from the supposed "quagmire of sexual violence and systematic humiliation." Claims that he compared in part to the reporting of abuse cases with the clerical propaganda of the Nazis, were rejected by Bishop Muller's spokesman yesterday as "far fetched." The bishop was merely in a sermon dedicated to the 100-year anniversary of the Catholic Women's League recalling  the courage of women in 1941 against the inhuman Nazi ideology, and currently calls for fidelity to Faith and Church.

Cathcon comments

"This morning,  Cardinal Walter Kasper distanced himself from the views expressed by the Bishop of Regensburg. On Bavarian Radio Kasper said that  the Catholic Church should not point the finger at others. "We want our own house in order,"- from the Hamburger Abendblatt.

The Head of the Central Committee of German Catholics, Alois Gluck has expressed similar sentiments. 

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