Speech of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Prefect to the German bishops – Catholic World Report

The following words are now meant precisely to awaken in each one of us this awareness of being a constituent part of a larger body and that just such a communion with all the other members of the Church can make possible—more than a thousand other gestures or brilliant declarations can—the hospitality that is so necessary today toward the person who is left on the side of the road.

And truly, there are so many men and women today who no longer feel “at home” in the house of the Lord and remain outside of it. Then there are also many men and women who feel deeply betrayed by the men and women of the Catholic Church and no longer associate with us. Above all there are, finally, many men and women who no longer place any trust in us Bishops. And there is good reason for this to happen. Our thoughts turn here immediately to the painful page [in recent Church history] of incidents of sexual abuse and, more generally, of the abuse of power committed by the clergy and to all the times when in such cases our response as Church did not measure up to the situation. In this regard we will never tire of asking the victims of this abuse for forgiveness, offering them whatever help we can; at the same time, we will never tire of renewing our resolution each day, so that incidents of abuse against minors and abuses of power by men and women of the Church will never have to happen again. In this respect, I can assure you that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is committed with all its might and with the utmost conscientiousness to ensuring that the punishments foreseen by the Code of Canon Law will be imposed on those clerics who have disgraced themselves by such abominable crimes.

From this perspective it appears that the Church in Germany is making an extremely praiseworthy effort internally to establish safety protocols so as to avoid all abuse against minors and any other form of violence against adult persons by clerics and more generally within ecclesial institutions. This commitment has assumed its particular concrete form in the Synodal Way which was started in 2019 by the Church in Germany and which just in recent months has reached a particularly important phase.

Speech of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Prefect to the German bishops – Catholic World Report