The Archbishop of Munich, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, asked the Pope this Friday to release him from his duties and recognized the “failure” of the Catholic Church in the “catastrophe of sexual abuse” within the German clergy.. “It is important for me to share the responsibility for the catastrophe of sexual abuse perpetrated by church officials in recent decades,” he wrote to the Pope, according to a statement in which he also denounced an “institutional failure” when dealing with this scandal that shook the clergy of the country.

In the email addressed to the pope dated May 21, which is quoted several times in the communiqué, the cardinal, former president of the German Bishops' Conference, one of the heavyweights of the country's ecclesiastical hierarchy, estimates that the church has come to a “stalemate”.

The recent conversations showed that “some within the church do not want to accept this responsibility and therefore the complicity of the institution and oppose any dialogue on reform and renewal in relation to the crisis of abuse” sexual, continues the text.

Reinhard Marx's resignation coincides with Pope Francis' decision last week to order an investigation into how to deal with cases of sexual abuse of minors in the diocese of Cologne, the largest in Germany, rocked by a scandal for months. and that it would implicate Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, the Archbishop of Hamburg, Stefan Hesse, who has already resigned from his position, and two other auxiliary bishops.

In September 2018, the German bishops released a report listing 3,677 cases of sexual abuse of children and young people by 1,670 clergymen between 1946 and 2014..

The pope appointed two “apostolic visitors”, a kind of extraordinary envoys from the church, in charge of “evaluating the complex pastoral situation created in the archbishopric and studying in parallel the possible commission of faults” by Cardinal Rainer-Maria Woelki and other prelates.. The pope resorts to these measures when he considers that a diocese can no longer solve a problem internally.

This announcement coincides with growing criticism against Cardinal Woelki, accused of having covered up for a long time two priests of the Düsseldorf religious community, suspected of sexual abuse.