Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising, Germany. Photo: CNS A report on the handling of abuse cases in Germany’s Archdiocese of Munich and Freising is unlikely to be published before January 2022.
Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, the law firm compiling the report, announced the delay last week. The Munich law firm said that the delay was caused by “new findings obtained in the recent past” that required an “intensive review”.
The study’s official title is “Report on the Sexual Abuse of Minors and Vulnerable Adults by Clerics, as well as [other] Employees, in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising from 1945 to 2019”.
The report will cover 1977 to 1982, the period when the future Benedict XVI led the archdiocese, as well as the tenure of Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who has served as archbishop of Munich and Freising since 2007.
The law firm produced a report in 2010 on the archdiocese’s handling of abuse cases that has never been published.
The Munich archdiocese, in Bavaria, southern Germany, dates back to 739 AD and serves more than 1.7 million Catholics in 758 parishes, out of a total population of 3.8 million people.