A report on sexual harassment of children in the Catholic Church will be released in Germany today, with the former pope in the spotlight. Benedict XVI, announced France24.

The Westpfahl Spilker Wastl (WSW) law firm report analyzes how abuses were handled at the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising between 1945 and 2019. The report, commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich, was to examine whether "those responsible complied with the law and acted appropriately in dealing with suspicious cases and possible perpetrators".

Former Pope Benedict, named after Joseph Ratzinger, was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982.

At the time, a pedophile priest, Peter Hullermann, was accused of harassing an 11-year-old boy. He was fined for moving to Munich from Essen in West Germany. Despite the scandal, he continued to perform pastoral duties and in 1986 was sentenced to probation for violence against several children.

Investigators suggest the violence took place at a time when Ratzinger was archbishop of Munich.

After the conviction, Hullermann continued to work with children. His case is an example of the church's wrong attitude towards bullies.

Benedict denied knowing about the priest's history. According to German media, the former pope gave an 82-page statement in response to the investigation.

"The pope" takes the fate of the victims of violence to heart "and fully agrees" to publish the Munich report, "his spokesman Georg Hanswein told the newspaper. Bild.

In 2013, Benedict, 94, became the first pope to resign, for the first time in 600 years. He now lives in a former convent in the Vatican.

The Catholic reform group Wir sind Kirche (We Are the Church) called on the former pontiff to take responsibility for what happened while he was head of the diocese in Munich.

"Ratzinger's acknowledgment that by his actions or inactions, knowingly or unknowingly, he is a personal and professional accomplice in the suffering of many young people would be an example to many other bishops and officials," the statement said.

In recent years, the Catholic Church in Germany has been rocked by a series of reports revealing widespread violence against children by priests.

The study, commissioned by the German Episcopal Conference in 2018, claims that 1.670 priests in the country committed some form of sexual assault on 3.677 minors between 1946 and 2014. But there are doubts that the number of victims is much higher.

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