Priests charged with abuse – girls stayed in the rectory
In the trial against a Catholic priest in Cologne, a witness and mother testified about the defendant. She does not recognize this person, to whom she had once entrusted herself as a pastor.
A Catholic clergyman has been standing before the Cologne district court for several weeks. The man is accused of abusing several girls. Since the start of the trial, further alleged victims have spoken out in the past few weeks. A former confidante of the man described that girls in the rectory went in and out, also for overnight stays. That made no one suspicious.
In the indictment, the public prosecutor’s office accuses the 70-year-old priest of having sexually abused his nieces, who were then between seven and 13, between 1993 and 1999, and in 2011 he was said to have abused another girl. A total of 33 cases are involved, three of which are rated as severe “because they supposedly had intercourse or acts similar to intercourse”. In the meantime, further cases of possible victims have become known in the course of the process.
On Friday, nun testified a pensioner whose daughters are said to be among the alleged victims. She got to know the clergyman because, as the mother of five children, she was looking for an appealing congregation.
On recommendation, she was then sent to the community in which the defendant was active at the time. She couldn’t say when that was exactly. In other respects, too, she remained vague with many answers or only confirmed facts when the presiding judge held them up to her.
Abuse trial against priests: “The children splashed around in the ‘Celi-Bad'”
Her older children found their way to the congregation through First Communion, youth groups and altar servers. She herself got in close contact with the pastor after she got into a crisis: “I turned to him as a pastor after my husband left me with five children.” The clergyman spontaneously decided to take the mother and her two youngest children with him to an upcoming free time, for which her three younger children had already been registered.
This resulted in “a relationship, of course, but not in the sexual sense”: For years she had been accompanying all the camps, cleaning the pastor’s house and taking vacations with him, sometimes as a couple, sometimes with the children “as a family”. She also had contact with the parents of the accused, his older brother and the younger brother’s wife, whom he had left.
The clergyman took care of all of them, as well as a girl and a boy whom he had already adopted as foster children before the ordination: “They are said to have splashed around in the celibate bath” – that is how the bath in the seminary was called.
Girls’ overnight stays in the rectory “of course”
She also spoke of overnight stays for girls from the congregation in the pastor’s house. “You say that as if it were a matter of course”, commented the presiding judge Christoph Kaufmann, visibly irritated. “That was a matter of course,” replied the witness. Girls from the community went in and out of the pastor’s house, and life had happened in his kitchen.
She did not find it strange that it was mostly girls, but typical of the church. She did not observe any violent behavior. However, she preferred to answer questions about details about overnight stays by girls only in camera, as well as questions related to alleged acts against her daughters.
In general, people in town are amazed at the allegations: “We shake our heads and don’t understand. This is not the person we met.” The accused priest followed the witness’s testimony with no apparent reaction. The process gets involved.