Pope Benedict's Brother Monsignor Ratzinger Admits Corporeal Punishment

Pope Benedict’s brother Georg Ratzinger admits to hitting children as choirmaster.The unfolding Catholic Church scandals in Germany and the Netherlands have now touched Pope Benedict’s brother, who has admitted to administering corporeal punishment, hitting children around the ears when they didn’t perform well at choir practice.

In an interview with the Catholic paper Passauer Neue Presse, Monsignor Ratzinger, 86, said he had no knowledge of sexual abuse, but admitted that boys were often punished harshly, sometimes in an arbitrary manner.

“I myself handed out slaps repeatedly, although I always had a bad conscience about it,” he said. via London Times

Monseignor Ratzinger referred to the headmaster in charge at the Regensburg school from 1953 to 1992 as being ‘very violent’.

Some former pupils have described the headmaster as a “sadist” who imposed “a reign of terror”, and have said they find it improbable that the choirmaster (the Pope’s brother) knew nothing about the sex abuse. via London Times

via Flickr’s Benoit.PLiberal Catholics in Germany, and the German Government’s Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, have accused the Vatican of suppressing the truth. Pope Benedict was head of Catholic doctrine in 2001 when he imposed a ”wall of silence”, declaring that abuse cases were ”subject to papal confidentiality”.

But Bishop Stephan Ackermann, the Church’s spokeman for issues related to abuse, said that her comments were “absurd,” according to Reuters. “Our guidelines insist that we involve state prosecutors,” Ackermann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. On the other hand, Freiburg Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who is also chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, has accused Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger of bashing the Church and demanded that she apologize for her statements. Zollitsch will travel to the Vatican on Friday to discuss the widening scandal with Catholic Church officials. via SPIEGEL ONLINE

Father Hans Kung, President of the Global Ethic Foundation and professor emeritus at the University of Tübingen in Germany, has linked clerical sex abuse with priestly celibacy, blaming the Church’s “uptight” views on sex for child abuse scandals in Germany, Ireland and the US.

Stripped of his licence to teach Catholic theology after he rejected the doctrine of Papal infallibility, Father Kung agrees that sexual abuse isn’t confined to the Catholic Church — which is today’s Vatican response and argument against being unfairly targeted — but that it’s statistically for more prevalent in the Catholic Church.

Father Kung says that St Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthinians: “Because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.” Peter and the apostles were married and their ministries did not suffer, he said, pointing out that thousands of priests protested when the new law was introduced as late as the 11th century.

Most scholars agree that Catholic celibacy were enacted to insure that property would be inherited by the Church and not offspring or family members of priests. Catholic News reports a different explanation given at last week’s theological meeting on celibacy in Rome.

Aquilino Polaino Lorente, a professor of psychopathology at the University of St. Paul Medical School in Madrid, said that accepting God’s call to a vocation as a celibate priest “does not carry any more psychological risks than marriage does.”

Human beings, with their intelligence and freedom, do not have to act on their sexual impulses in order to be happy and healthy, he said, and, in fact, never controlling those impulses is a sure sign of a serious psychological problem. via Catholic News