A group of experts has examined the term of office of the late Hildesheim Bishop Janssen – with terrifying results.
If priests were accused of sexual abuse of children, they were previously only transferred to another parish in the Diocese of Hildesheim. The church provided support and protection for the perpetrators, while those affected received no offers of help.
This is a result of a new study on sexual violence. To this end, an external group of experts examined the term of office of Hildesheim Bishop Heinrich Maria Janssen from 1957 to 1982.
Janssen, who died in 1988 at the age of 80, is the first bishop in Germany to be accused of sexually abusing a boy. The allegations of two victims, documented in 2015 and 2018, were the starting point for the independent investigation. The experts found no further evidence of abuses committed by the bishop. The two allegations against Janssen have not been refuted, said the chairman of the commission, the former Lower Saxony Minister of Justice Antje Niewisch-Lennartz.
The group found no evidence of cooperation between clerics who committed sexual violence. Such networks of perpetrators were not even necessary, explained Niewisch-Lennartz. The children were at the mercy of the perpetrators, for example in tent camps, the pastors’ private apartments, and often in church-run children’s homes.
A total of 71 suspects were identified, 51 of them from the term of office of Bishop Janssen. Of these, 45 were clergy and 26 were secular workers, mostly men. The group of experts discovered new suspects despite the incomplete personnel files.
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