ONE OF Germany’s most controversial clergymen, conservative bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg, has denied accusations from four women and two men that he beat them as children in an orphanage.
After his office described the claims as “absurd, untrue and clearly invented”, Dr Mixa issued a statement yesterday offering to meet his accusers.
“I am deeply shaken by the accusations made against me and would like to reassure people that I have never used physical violence in any form against children or youths,” the 68-year-old bishop said in a statement.
So far four women and two men have come forward, all of whom lived in St Joseph’s orphanage in the town of Schrobenhausen, near Augsburg, in the 1970s and 1980s where Dr Mixa served as priest.
"He hit me with full force in the face," said one unnamed 47-year-old man in an affidavit seen by the Süddeutsche Zeitungnewspaper.
Other accusations, all made in affidavits, include regular beatings on bare buttocks with a carpet beater or a stick.
“He pulled down my trousers at least 50 times in total and hit me with a stick five to seven times on my bottom,” an unnamed witness who lived in the orphanage from 1972 to 1982 told the newspaper.
A second unnamed man claimed the bishop once hit him so hard on the bottom with a wooden spoon that it broke.
“He continued hitting me with his bare hand,” the man told the newspaper, adding that the bishop told the children as he dispensed the blows: “Accept God’s punishment” or “Satan is in you, I’ll drive him out.” A third former orphan, 48-year-old Hildegard Sedlmair, accuses the bishop of boxing her on the arm with his fist.
“Every time I see his face in the paper then the humiliations overcome me again and the day’s over for me.” Other former orphans report being knocked off their feet by Bishop Mixa’s blows.
The German Bishops’ Conference has given its full backing to Bishop Mixa, appointed bishop of Augsburg in 2005.
The Catholic lay organisation We Are Church said “the bishop was entitled to the same assumption of innocence until guilt is proven”.
“But if the allegations are confirmed then he will have to take the consequences and resign,” said the organisation.
In a newspaper interview in February Bishop Mixa called abuse at the hands of priests a “particularly awful crime” but added that “the so-called sexual revolution . . . is not without blame either”.
Bishop Mixa is a regular, controversial, voice in the German media. Most recently he criticised new laws aimed at helping young mothers return to the workplace, saying they reduced women to a role of “child-bearing machines” and put children in care facilities which he said reminded him of East German children’s homes.
German Catholics will be asked to pray for victims of clerical child abuse at Good Friday services today.