Bishop investigates bishops: Commission criticizes investigation into church abuse

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Chur’s Bishop Joseph Bonnemain had to judge his colleagues, whom he had known for decades. It was a mistake to entrust the investigation to the Bishop of Chur. “This is a very bad solution,” Cecar president Sylvie Perrinjaquet said in an interview published in “Arcinfo” on Saturday.

Perrinjaquet pointed to the ‘cult of secrecy’ within the Catholic Church. Its representatives “live in this atmosphere of secrecy all the time,” she said. “They no longer have the ability to realize that at some point you have to stop denying yourself and admit that there are people in the church who abuse children.”

In addition to secrecy, there is also a problematic attitude of the church towards women and children: “In the statements that the church has been making for a few days now, I have become aware that for this institution the abuse of a child is less serious than sexual relations with a woman,” Perrinjaquet said.

The Catholic Church was shocked

“The institution is shocked,” she said, emphasizing that the publication of the University of Zurich report on Tuesday had forced the Catholic Church to acknowledge that there were abusers in its ranks.

Catholic clergy and members of religious orders have committed at least a thousand cases of sexual abuse in Switzerland over the past seventy years. This is evident from the first analysis of secret archives of Roman Catholic institutions by historians from the University of Zurich (UZH), which was published on Tuesday.

(SDA)

Source:Blick