When Pope Francis meets Germany’s Catholic bishops in Rome this week, the key question is who faces greater pressure: the host or his guests?
Pope Francis will want to hear about the latest stages of the reformist “synodal path” the German church began in 2019. Amid growing pressure for a liberal shift on sexual teaching and women priests, the Argentinian pontiff remarked last June: “In Germany, there is a very good Evangelical Church. We don’t need two.”
But the regular so-called “ad limina” visit of German bishops has increased pressure on the pope to decide the fate of controversial Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, archbishop of Cologne.
He is under investigation by prosecutors in the western German city on suspicion of giving false testimony over a clerical sex abuser in the western German archdiocese.
Fr Winfried Pilz was a prominent hymn songwriter and president of a well-known German charity Die Sternsinger, which distributes money gathered door-to-door by children dressed as the Three Wise Men.
The priest died in 2019 but it was only in June of this year, after media revelations, that the Cologne archdiocese acknowledged how Pilz had, in 2012, been found guilty of abusing a minor and banned from contact with children.
Further abuse allegations involving the priest have since come to light but Cardinal Woelki insisted, in an affidavit last August, that he had only “concerned himself” with the Pilz case in June 2022.
Now a former assistant to the archdiocese personnel chief has insisted this claim is untrue.
Hildegard Dahm said that, in 2015, she compiled a list for her boss of 14 priests accused of abuse in the archdiocese, including the name Pilz, which he took into a meeting with Woelki.
“It may be that he didn’t look at the sheet with Pilz and the other 13 names, but I definitely brought it to his attention,” she told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger daily. After the meeting, when she asked her boss how the cardinal responded to the list, he reportedly told her: “It didn’t interest him at all.”
A spokesman for the archdiocese said “the woman doesn’t know whether the cardinal saw the list, another list or none at all. She is making claims out of the blue”.
But her interview has prompted public prosecutors to begin a preliminary investigation into whether the cardinal made false claims in his affidavit on Fr Pilz.
The claims come two years after revelations that, when he took over as archbishop of Cologne in 2014, Woelki did not forward to Rome the name of another abusing priest, as required by church regulations.
After another crisis, over two separate clerical abuse reports, the cardinal was placed on five months’ leave in October 2021. On his return last March he submitted a resignation letter, to which Pope Francis has yet to respond, and a revolt has continued to build against him in Cologne.
Many diocesan staff refuse to work with him, the choir of Cologne Cathedral decline to sing when he is scheduled to preach and abuse survivors have accused him of manipulating them to shield himself from bad publicity.
His supporters see the cardinal, a conservative opponent of the reform process, as the victim of a smear campaign. Last year some 40,000 Catholics in Cologne left the church in protest.
