Guess who the Virgin Mary appeared to in rural eastern Austria? Serial pedophile Hans Hermann Cardinal Groër.
The future Cardinal Groër, a Benedictine monk who organized high-profile monthly pilgrimages to a shrine in rural eastern Austria where he said he once had an apparition of the Virgin Mary, was a surprise choice when he was named archbishop on July 15, 1986, priests and senior church officials say.
The question is, not whether Groër's apparitions were valid, but whether they brought him closer to his god, and how many boys he raped during the many pilgrimages he lead to the place of his virgin's appearing.
Karin Bennhold of The New York Times published the results of an investigation into the handling of serial pedophile Cardinal Groër, which exposes how inept then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now-Pope Ben) and Pope John Paul II were in vetting Groër, a rumored pedophile at the time of his assent to archbishop, how they didn't punish him until there was widespread public outcry, how a good priest resigned in protest of the Vatican's inaction, and how even after Ratzinger finally removed Groër from ministry, the pedophile never stood trial in the church or state courts.
Here are a few snipets from the article, (which can be found in its entirety by clicking here):
Pope Benedict/Ratzinger paved the way for Groër's ascent.
(Note: the subheadings are my addition)
The favorite on the final short list was a conservative clergyman, the Rev. Kurt Krenn, who had close ties to some of John Paul’s closest confidants, two senior officials with knowledge of the process said. “The energetic protest of Cardinal Ratzinger was decisive in removing Kurt Krenn from the list,” said one of the officials, who worked at the Vienna Archdiocese at the time and who declined to be identified because the procedure is confidential. Benedict, known for his rigorous theology, objected that his Austrian colleague, Father Krenn, did not have a Ph.D. in theology, but rather in philosophy, say officials and priests in Vienna who knew both men.
Pope Benedict/Ratzinger failed to properly vet Groër.
In the words of Cardinal Schönborn, who first met Cardinal Ratzinger in 1972 when he was the future pope’s student and has been close to him ever since, Benedict “was the second most important man in the Vatican and had without doubt the ear of the pope.”
But blocking Bishop Krenn does not appear to have been accompanied by a thorough vetting of Cardinal Groër, who was already under suspicion within his own abbey of sexually abusing minors and young men.
The Rev. Udo Fischer, a priest who attended the Hollabrunn boys’ seminary in eastern Austria in the 1960s and early 1970s, where Cardinal Groër had lived and taught for decades, said that in 1985 he personally warned the abbot of their local Benedictine monastery about Cardinal Groër’s inappropriate behavior with boys, whom he often referred to as “little angels.”
Father Fischer told Abbot Clemens Lashofer of Göttweig Abbey that he himself had been molested by Cardinal Groër when they worked together on a youth movement devoted to the Virgin Mary in the early 1970s, and that he had observed him acting inappropriately with others who were not willing to come forward.
When Father Fischer learned about Cardinal Groër’s appointment as archbishop, he said he sent an angry telegram to Abbot Lashofer and asked why he had not spoken up. The abbot, who was head of Austria’s Benedictine order at the time, claimed he had never been questioned by the Vatican’s representative, the nuncio. “If they really did not ask him, they did not want to know,” Father Fischer said.
It was a "known secret" that Groër abused.
Members of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, whose ranks included Cardinal Ratzinger at the time, tend to review detailed files about the candidates before deciding which ones to recommend to the pope. “It is a very complicated procedure,” said Lorenz Wolf, judicial vicar of the archdiocese in Munich. “It is very improbable that someone could hide something.”
The rumors surrounding Cardinal Groër’s transgressions went beyond the circle of those who suffered at his hands. Josef Votzi, the journalist who broke the scandal in 1995 in the magazine Profil, is another Hollabrunn alumnus and said that even among staff members of the Vienna Archdiocese he interviewed when Father Groër was named archbishop, his history was “an open secret.”
Pope Benedict/Ratzinger's actions at the time are inexplicable to those who knew him.
Cardinal Schönborn said he could not explain why Cardinal Ratzinger had so much influence with the pope on other matters, but lacked the clout to have Cardinal Groër investigated for abuse. “I am not responsible to explain everything,” he said. “I just know that that is how it was.”
Nor did Benedict’s subsequent communications on the matter shed much light on the scandal. In letters he sent to Austrian clergy members after the scandal, he made no mention of the former archbishop’s transgressions, instead warning bishops against ceding ground on the reformist proposals of the Catholic grass-roots movements that had sprung up.
Groër was only removed after widespread public outcry.
In 1996, Cardinal Groër was named head of a priory in Germany then overseen by Göttweig Abbey and still appeared at official church functions. This sparked a vocal rebellion in Göttweig in late 1997, among some of his former students and victims, who called for his resignation.
Faced with such upheaval, church officials removed Cardinal Groër from the priory and sent him back in January to the convent where he had lived after he was forced out in 1995. Shortly afterward, John Paul II approved a Vatican investigation.
The results of the Groër investigation were kept secret; no trial or public rebuke.
But no result of the investigation was ever made public, and Cardinal Groër never faced a church court or even a public rebuke from Rome, let alone a secular trial.
A good priest left in protest of these lackadaisical actions and was quickly dismissed.
Many in the Austrian clergy criticized what they saw as an attempt by Rome to protect a cardinal while ignoring victims demanding justice. Prior Gottfried Schätz, the No. 2 at Göttweig Abbey who had helped lead the outcry against Cardinal Groër, left in September 1998 and requested removal from the priesthood, which he was granted unusually quickly, within a year, Father Fischer said.
Father Schermann said, “They did as much as they had at each point in time given the public outcry, and no more.”
Will the Vatican continue to use deceased and soon-to-be-Saint John Paul II as a scapegoat for Pope Benedict/Ratzinger's participation and culpability in the Groër pedophilia debacle? My prediction is that they will paint John Paul II as the true mastermind behind the Vatican's systematic cover-up, only to canonize him a saint a few years down the road.
It's time for some serious flushing in the Vatican.
