Abuse Scandals In The Catholic Church

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Child abuse in the Catholic Church was long a taboo subject, kept under wraps by senior church dignitaries. But in the pursuit of justice, the Church’s inactivity eventually prompted the victims of child abuse to take matters into their own hands.

“For too long the Church has denied, ignored, and hushed up abuse. The victims are entitled to justice.” In September 2018, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, head of the German Bishops’ Conference, uttered these words and apologized to all victims of sexual abuse by Catholic officials in Germany. But Matthias Katsch, one of the most prominent representatives of victims in Germany, maintains that the Church’s handling of abuse remains problematic even now. A former pupil at the private Canisius-Kolleg school and spokesperson for the “Squared Table” victims’ initiative uncovered the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Germany in 2010. For over thirty years, his abusers’ crimes had stayed covered up. Then, Matthias Katsch and his former classmates broke the silence when they turned to the public with accusations against their former teachers – Jesuit priests Peter R. and Wolfgang S. And what happened next? Not much, it seems. Both men were spotted in Chile after 2010. Impatient with the lack of progress, Matthias Katsch took matters into his own hands and set out to Chile to find the abusers – and their next victims. Filmmaker Eva Müller went with him.
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All over the world, an increasing number of nuns are coming forward with reports that they have been sexually abused by male clerics. The documentary film provides insights into a deeply disturbing – and barely addressed — problem within the Catholic church.

The Catholic church has been blighted by sexual abuse scandals for decades. Initially, public awareness was focused on the abuse of children and young people. But a few years ago, reports of another scandal began to emerge, one that the church tried to cover up for a long time: In many parts of the world, nuns claimed they had been raped by senior clerics. Some of the revelations also concerned high-ranking Vatican dignitaries.
Nuns who become pregnant were either threatened with expulsion from their communities or forced into abortions. These offenses, some committed in a systematic fashion, were mostly ignored. In the cases that went public and therefore demanded an investigation, the accused priests were acquitted by Vatican courts.
But over the past two decades, the wall of silence began to crumble. In spite of explicit reports, also directed at the Holy See, for a long time the Vatican did nothing to stop the abuse and sometimes systematic sexual enslavement of nuns.