The Vatican has ordered an investigation into high-ranking Catholic clerics in Switzerland in reference to sexual abuse, the Swiss Bishops’ Conference said on Sunday.
The group said in an announcement that there have been allegations against several lively and retired bishops in addition to other clergy for his or her handling of abuse cases.
Specifically, they’re accused of covering up abuse cases. There are also accusations that some committed sexual assaults themselves previously.
“There are accusations against a few of them of getting committed sexual assaults themselves previously,” it said.
According to the bishops’ conference, the Vatican received a letter with the allegations in May and subsequently appointed Swiss Bishop Joseph Bonnemain to go a preliminary investigation in June.
Bonnemain has a history of investigating sexual assaults across the church, the statement said.
Father Nicolas Betticher, a priest on the Bruder Klaus church within the Swiss capital Bern, confirmed to The Associated Press that he had written the letter, which first got here to light earlier Sunday in report by the newspaper Blick.
The letter, which Blick said it had obtained, accuses six bishops of getting covered up cases of abuse. Beyond that, a bishop and three priests are accused of sexually molesting teenagers, the paper reported.
In a phone interview, Betticher told the AP he was motivated by a call from Pope Francis himself for members of the clergy to “announce” any signs of sexual abuse or cover-up that they could have come across, and by years of hand-wringing about sexual abuses cases that thwarted efforts at justice and the reality by victims and their families.
He suggested that the Catholic church had professed to make a crucial reckoning and efforts to strengthen canon law about cases of sexual abuse and harassment lately, but mistakes were continuing.
“Twenty years ago, we didn’t have a sufficient legal basis and due to this fact we made a whole lot of mistakes,” Betticher said. “Now, I see that for 10 years, we now have continued to make mistakes and today, there’s a form of will to cover certain things, or to not be precise, and never to undergo with the checks (of allegations of sexual abuse).”
“Today, we will now not afford to easily say, ‘Ah yes, I do know, but I didn’t do it quite right, but we’ll do higher next time.’ That’s over,” Betticher added. “It completely discredits the Church. And that’s what disturbs me, because on the core, people tell us: ‘We don’t want to return anymore, we’re leaving the church.’ And that, for me, is unacceptable.”
Several of the clerics named within the Blick article rejected Betticher’s accusations that they’d not reacted properly to abuse allegations, the paper wrote.
The bishops’ conference said in its statement that along with internal church investigations into the accusations, it had also notified the relevant Swiss public prosecutor’s offices “of the cases mentioned within the letter.”
The latest allegations come just days before the presentation of a report on sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in Switzerland. The pilot study was commissioned by the bishops’ conference and conducted by the University of Zurich. It can be presented on Tuesday.
—-
Keaten reported from Lyon, France.
