Report on sexual abuse in key German diocese to be released

A long-awaited report on the Catholic Church’s handling of cases of sexual abuse by clergy and others in Germany’s Munich archdiocese is set to be released

BERLIN -- A long-awaited report on the Catholic Church's handling of sexual abuse by clergy and others in Germany's Munich archdiocese, which was once led by retired Pope Benedict XVI, is set to be released Thursday.

The archdiocese commissioned the report from law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl nearly two years ago, with a mandate to look into abuse between 1945 and 2019 and whether church officials handled allegations correctly.

The archdiocese, whose current archbishop is a prominent ally of Pope Francis, and the law firm say that top church officials have not been informed of the results ahead of its publication.

Munich's archbishop, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, hasn't been implicated in any wrongdoing to date. But in an extraordinary gesture last year, he offered to resign over the Catholic Church’s “catastrophic” mishandling of clergy sexual abuse cases, declaring that the scandals had brought the church to “a dead end.”