How a Molestation Case Emerged Decades Later

By Nicholas Kulish

ESSEN, Germany — The case that has raised questions about the future pope’s handling of a pedophile priest in Germany came to light three decades after it occurred, and then almost by chance. It happened when Wilfried Fesselmann, an early victim, said he stumbled on Internet photographs of the priest who sexually abused him, still working with children.

Mr. Fesselmann, who had long remained silent about the abuse he suffered in 1979, said the pictures stunned him and spurred him to contact his abuser. Thus began the convoluted process, which included an extortion investigation against Mr. Fesselmann for the emotionally raw e-mail messages he sent the church in 2008 demanding compensation, that ultimately put Pope Benedict XVI in an uncomfortable spotlight.

After the police investigated him for blackmail, Mr. Fesselmann did not discuss his charges publicly until last month. By that time, molestation of children by other priests had exploded into public view in Germany, with scores of investigations into old and new cases capturing headlines nationwide.

The fact that it took so long before the Roman Catholic Church took action against the abusive priest, and that the victim initially had to defend himself, is an indication that the German church — as well as Germany’s police, courts and society at large — are still in the early stages of reckoning on a psychologically fraught issue that many Germans once dismissed as an American problem.

Mr. Fesselmann also had no way of knowing that his case would create repercussions for the church that went well beyond his own grievance. His and other cases of abuse caused the church to transfer the abusive priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, to Munich in 1980, a decision that required the approval of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the archbishop of Munich and Freising, now the pope. Father Hullermann was given therapy in Munich, but he was allowed to resume his pastoral duties almost immediately.

Father Hullermann went on to molest other boys and was not formally suspended until last month, after the German church acknowledged that “bad mistakes” were made in the handling of his case. The church said the decision to allow the priest to resume his duties in 1980 was made solely by Cardinal Ratzinger’s top aide at the time, but church officials also said the future pope was sent a memo about the reassignment.

While the church has acknowledged Father Hullermann’s extensive history of sexual abuse, there have been no court proceedings on Mr. Fesselmann’s claims.

Three decades after Mr. Fesselmann said Father Hullermann forced him, then 11, to perform oral sex on him, he saw pictures of the priest — older and now heavy-set, but still recognizable — working with children in Bavaria, at the opposite end of the country.

Mr. Fesselmann sent intermittent e-mail messages to Father Hullermann over the next year and a half. The messages were unsigned but sent from his personal account. In his messages he threatened to go public and asked about victims’ compensation. The e-mail was answered not by Father Hullermann but by diocesan authorities in Munich, who asked Mr. Fesselmann to give them his full name so they could look into his charges.

He did not, but on the morning of April 24, 2008, while he was still corresponding with the archdiocese, six men appeared unannounced at his home in Essen: two police officers from Bavaria, two police officers from Essen, a city official and a representative of the church.

“They said that they were there at 10 o’clock out of consideration, because my children were in school by then,” said Mr. Fesselmann, now 41, an unemployed father of three.

Prosecutors in Traunstein, the town in deeply Catholic Bavaria where Pope Benedict grew up, were investigating Mr. Fesselmann on charges of blackmail.

Church officials say that in this case they did exactly what they have been criticized so often for not doing: They referred the case to prosecutors rather than handling it internally. From there, it was prosecutors who chose to open the blackmail investigation.

“It is our duty to determine if there are criminal offenses, without pursuing them from any particular direction,” said Günther Hammerdinger, a spokesman for the Traunstein prosecutors office. “Since the possible sexual offenses were clearly past the statute of limitations, no investigative proceedings against the priest were started”.

Pressure on Mr. Fesselmann began long before he ever considered going public. He said that he was assaulted by other members of his church youth group, who blamed him for the suspension of Father Hullermann, a popular young chaplain, in 1979 and his later departure for Munich. Mr. Fesselmann’s devoutly religious parents were not among the three sets of parents who brought accusations to the priest in charge of St. Andreas Church at the time, charges Father Hullermann did not deny, according to the Essen Diocese.

“You weren’t supposed to say anything against the church,” Mr. Fesselmann said of his upbringing. On her deathbed in 2000, his mother asked him “to forget the whole thing and not to do anything about it,” Mr. Fesselmann said. He had told a friend about the abuse, whose parents then complained to the church.

Relatively few victims have come forward publicly in Germany to tell their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of priests, as Mr. Fesselmann did in the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung last month. Culturally, Germany is more reserved, and its people less demonstrative and emotionally open than in the United States.

The atmosphere for victims of sexual abuse in Europe today is similar to what it was nearly a decade ago in the United States, where victims viewed themselves as isolated cases and did not see the point in coming forward, said Barbara Blaine, president of the advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

“There doesn’t seem to be an environment where victims feel safe or free to speak up,” Ms. Blaine said.

Nor can victims in Germany expect the kind of million-dollar payouts that some American victims have received. Manuela Groll, a lawyer in Berlin representing 15 students who say they were abused at Jesuit high schools in Germany, said that the highest civil judgment for a case of severe sexual abuse of a minor that she could find was less than $70,000 and a small monthly stipend.

Mr. Fesselmann, who as an adult had panic attacks that he said his therapist told him were a result of childhood trauma, said he wanted Father Hullermann to confess what he had done and stop working with children.

A large man with a gentle manner, Mr. Fesselmann was no stranger to public attention. He has written two books on living well off the German welfare system, and appeared on television many times here.

Mr. Fesselmann originally requested to have his full name kept out of media reports, and was cited only as Wilfried F. by The New York Times  in a previous article. But his full name was published last month — against his wishes, he said — in Germany’s largest-circulation newspaper, the tabloid Bild.

After his initial e-mail messages in 2006, a year and a half went by before he again e-mailed Father Hullermann and again received a response from a representative of the archdiocese handling child-abuse cases, Msgr. Siegfried Kneissl.

In printed copies of e-mail messages from April 2008 provided by Mr. Fesselmann, Monsignor Kneissl encouraged him to come forward and allow church officials to check out his story.

In his response, sent on April 18, Mr. Fesselmann sounded angry and impatient, scolding Monsignor Kneissl for misspelling the name of the pedophile priest and writing that he had until April 30 to respond with “your offer with a financial allotment”. According to the prosecutor’s office in Traunstein, the investigation against Mr. Fesselmann had already begun, on April 15, 2008.

Criminal police officers from the nearby Bavarian town of Mühldorf visited Mr. Fesselmann on April 24, the prosecutors office in Traunstein confirmed. Prosecutors also questioned Father Hullermann, but he was not investigated by the office at that time or since.

But the priest was re-evaluated by church officials. He was relieved of his duties in the town of Garching an der Alz on May 6, 2008, and later sent to work in the spa town of Bad Tölz, on the condition that he no longer work with children. Father Hullermann was suspended last month, three days after his case became public, after the news media reported that he was still working with children in his new position. Last week, new accusations of sexual abuse emerged, both from his first assignment near Essen in the 1970s and from 1998 in Garching.

Three weeks after the police visited his home, Mr. Fesselmann received a letter in the mail from prosecutors, saying that the investigation had been dropped as of May 14, 2008. “The defense of the accused cannot be disproved, that he had no intention to ask for money or to be compensated, but that instead he intended to get proof of the incidents between him and the witness Hullermann,” the letter said.

The New York Times

Condemned 'sorcerer' won't die Friday, lawyer says

From Mohammed Jamjoom, CNN

(CNN) -- A Lebanese man condemned to death for sorcery by a court in Saudi Arabia won't face beheading Friday, his lawyer said Thursday.

May El Khansa told CNN she received assurances from Lebanon's justice minister that Ali Hussain Sibat will not be executed Friday. But there was no indication that Sibat's death sentence would be commuted or that he would be released, she said.

There was no immediate confirmation of the report from Lebanon's Justice Ministry, and Saudi authorities have not responded to requests for comment on Sibat's case. Sibat's wife made an emotional plea for mercy during a CNN interview Thursday, asking the kingdom's rulers to let him come back to his country and his family".

"All I ask is for the Saudi king and the Saudi government to show him mercy -- let him come back to his country and his family," Samira Rahmoon said.

Sibat used to offer predictions and advice to callers on a Lebanese television network.

Sibat was arrested by Saudi Arabia's religious police and charged with sorcery while visiting the country for an Islamic pilgrimage in May 2008, according to May El Khansa, his attorney in Lebanon. Saudi authorities have not disclosed details of the charge for which Sibat has been condemned and have not responded to requests for comment on the case.

"We can't understand how they could arrest him and charge him and sentence him to death," Rahmoon said. "It doesn't make any sense".

El Khansa said Wednesday that she had been told about the upcoming execution by a Saudi source with knowledge of the case and the proceedings. Lebanon's government says it has no confirmation that his execution has been set. But Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar said he had asked the Saudis to halt any scheduled execution and release Sibat, calling the punishment "disproportionate".

"I have asked them not to implement any execution in this case," he said. "As far as I know, such an act doesn't deserve such a punishment, unless there is something else -- something that I have not had the possibility to study or to examine myself".

Rahmoon said the family has been unable to contact Sibat "for a long time".

A law against witchcraft remains on the books in Lebanon, but is the equivalent of a misdemeanor, Najjar said.

"I respect the law of Saudi Arabia, which is based on Sharia law," he said. "But at the same time, I'm very concerned about such a sentence".

Sibat was convicted by a court in Medina and sentenced to death in November, El Khansa said. He appealed, and his case was sent back to the trial court for reconsideration. But the judges in Medina upheld their original verdict in March, she said.

The human rights group Amnesty International has called for Sibat's release. His case drew a small knot of protesters from a Lebanese youth group to the Saudi Embassy in Beirut on Thursday, and Najjar said he told his Saudi counterpart that beheading Sibat "would not be productive" to Lebanese-Saudi relations.

"I have done what I thought was responsible for the justice minister in Lebanon to do, and I said to my colleague in Saudi Arabia that such an act in Lebanon would not be sanctioned by more than two months of imprisonment," Najjar said.

CNN

Military's refusal to discharge lesbian a new Catch-22

A general alleges that Lt. Robin Chaurasiya only acknowledged she was in a civil union with another woman to avoid service. Advocates say his decision shows gay troops don't undercut the military

By Julian E. Barnes

Reporting from Washington - Lt. Robin R. Chaurasiya wasn't exactly asked, but she told anyway: She is a lesbian, and in a civil union with another woman.

Her commander at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, Lt. Gen. Robert R. Allardice, could have discharged her under the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Instead, he determined in February that she should remain in the Air Force because she acknowledged her sexual orientation for the purpose of "avoiding and terminating military service".

Chaurasiya says that is not true. But the general's reasoning has the flavor of a Catch-22: If you admit to being homosexual you can be discharged from the military, but if you admit it for the purposes of being discharged you won't be.

Yet the action is being cited by some opponents of the controversial prohibition on open gay military service as a sign of willingness to reinterpret rules after President Obama called on Congress to overturn the controversial 1993 law.

At the very least, said Nathaniel Frank, an expert on "don't ask, don't tell," the Chaurasiya case appears to turn the rationale behind the gay ban on its head.

"If commanders are ignoring or rejecting credible evidence of homosexuality because of the alleged motive of the person who makes the statement, the bottom line is they are keeping gay people in the service," said Frank, a senior research fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Palm Center. "That gives the lie that known gay people undercut the militar".

Officially, "don't ask, don't tell" remains in place and service members are still being discharged for homosexual conduct. But how to handle such discharges clearly has become a delicate matter inside the Pentagon.

In a round-table interview Wednesday, Army Secretary John M. McHugh said that during a review of the policy several soldiers had acknowledged to him that they were gay. McHugh initially said he wouldn't seek to punish them for responding candidly to his questions, but on Thursday he sought to refine that answer.

Emphasizing that "don't ask" remains law, McHugh said in a statement that he should have counseled the soldiers that anything they said could not be kept confidential and could lead to their discharge. But McHugh said he couldn't pursue punishment of the soldiers because he was unable to identify them.

Under existing regulations, the military has the ability to retain service members who say they are gay for the purpose of avoiding service, according to Cynthia Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Such rules have been used to discourage or stop recruits from falsely claiming they are gay to back out of boot camp. But it has been rare for military commanders to issue a formal finding, according to advocates for gay and lesbian service members.

If more commanders begin to use the regulation, it will result in more gays and lesbians being allowed to serve openly.

An estimated 16,000 service members have been discharged under "don't ask, don't tell."

Last month, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates ordered new rules to make it tougher for third parties to accuse a member of the military of being gay.

J. Alexander Nicholson III, the executive director of Servicemembers United, which represents gay veterans and service members, said there was "a clear message that the Department of Defense wants to curtail discharges more and more".

In his Feb. 25 decision ending any administrative discharge action against Chaurasiya, Allardice cited a section of the "don't ask, don't tell" law that allows military commanders to keep service members on active duty if they married a person of the same sex for the purpose of getting out of the military.

Like many cases, Chaurasiya's situation is complicated. She had left active duty in 2007, after serving one year, but was recalled to active duty in 2009.

After she was sent to Scott Air Force Base, a male former service member she had once dated forwarded to her commander a group e-mail in which Chaurasiya had written that she was a lesbian.

After an investigation, Chaurasiya submitted a memorandum to her commander declaring herself a lesbian.

"I want to be respected for it, and if I am going to be disrespected I don't want to be here," Chaurasiya said.

Chaurasiya said she did not enter into the union or declare herself a lesbian to get a discharge.

"My intention is not to get out," she said. "But if I am going to be kept in and treated unfairly either from my peers or by the military itself . . . then I want to be loud about it to bring about the change, or I do not want to be here".

Los Angeles Times

Army chief reverses course, to uphold policy on gays

By Catalina Camia, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Army Secretary John McHugh backtracked Thursday on his vow not to discharge troops who tell him that they are gay.

McHugh said in a statement that he was "incorrect" when he had said there would be a moratorium on discharges while the Pentagon conducts a year-long review of the ban on gays serving in the military.

The 1993 law, known as "don't ask, don't tell," requires gay men and lesbians in uniform to keep quiet about their sexual orientation or face expulsion.

Earlier this week, McHugh had told reporters that he had met men and women in uniform who told him that they were gay, but he said he wouldn't punish them even though they technically violated the law. McHugh said he believed "it would be counterproductive" to expel them while the policy is being reviewed.

"I might better have counseled them that statements about their sexual orientation could not be treated as confidential and could result in their separation under the law," said McHugh, a former New York congressman.

The secretary said he would not pursue discharges because he could not identify those soldiers.

McHugh stressed "there is no moratorium of the law" and that he and the Army would continue to uphold the law.

In February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked for a study on the impact of doing away with the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The change in the Pentagon's long-standing position on the policy stemmed from President Obama, who said during his State of the Union Address that he would work with Congress to repeal the law.

Gates announced last week new rules that would make it more difficult to discharge gay men or women in the military, including that the Pentagon would no longer investigate anonymous complaints against troops.

Contributing: Associated Press

USA Today

Army: Gays still can be dismissed if they speak up

By ANNE FLAHERTY

The Associated Press 

WASHINGTON -- Reversing course, Army Secretary John McHugh warned soldiers Thursday that they still can be discharged for acknowledging they are gay, saying he misspoke earlier this week when he suggested the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy had been temporarily suspended.

The public stumble by a senior service official is an indication of the issue's legal complexity. The Pentagon has said it wants to hear from gay troops as it conducts a broad study on how it could lift the ban, as President Barack Obama wants.

But to do that, gay service members would have to break the law, which prohibits them from discussing their sexual orientation.

Defense Department officials say they plan to hire an outside contractor to survey the troops, and that gay troops won't be punished for sharing their views with that third party.

"Until Congress repeals 'don't ask, don't tell,' it remains the law of the land and the Department of the Army and I will fulfill our obligation to uphold it," McHugh said in a statement Thursday.

Earlier in the week, when pressed by reporters, McHugh said he wouldn't try to discharge service members who in private conversations with him acknowledged being gay. He also said he believed that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had placed a moratorium on dismissals while the Pentagon surveyed troops on their opinions.

On Thursday, McHugh said he misspoke.

"There is no moratorium of the law and neither (Gates) nor I would support one," McHugh said.

With regard to three soldiers who told McHugh they were gay, McHugh said he probably should have told them that they were violating the law and their conversation couldn't necessarily be kept confidential.

But he said he won't pursue administrative action against those individuals.

"Because of the informal and random manner in which these engagements occurred, I am unable to identify these soldiers and I am not in a position to formally pursue the matter," he added.

While the ban remains intact, the Pentagon has made it tougher to get discharged under the law. Earlier this month, Gates announced new guidelines that tighten the rules for evidence when someone reports that a soldier is gay and puts higher-ranking officers in charge of dismissal proceedings.

An estimated 13,000 people have been discharged under the law. Although most of the dismissals have been the result of gay service members outing themselves, advocates for repeal of the law say it has been used to drum out capable soldiers who never made their sexuality an issue.

The Washington Post

Catholic Abuse Hotline Overrun Amid New Allegations

A hotline set up by the Catholic Church in Germany to counsel victims of sexual abuse was overrun on its first day, with almost 4,500 calls. Further allegations have continued to emerge even as Chancellor Angela Merkel says the church is taking "necessary measures".

It was a much criticized idea. Earlier this month, Germany's Catholic Church announced that it was planning a hotline for sexual abuse victims to call should they be in need of counselling or advice. Given the ever-increasing wave of abuse allegations being levelled at clerics in Germany this spring, however, many critics doubted whether victims would phone up the organization that was responsible for their suffering in the first place.

The critics were wrong. On Wednesday, the first full day of the hotline's operation, fully 4,459 people phoned up -- far more than the therapists hired to man the phones could handle. Indeed, they were only able to conduct 162 counselling sessions, ranging from five minutes to an hour in length. Andreas Zimmer, head of the project in the Bishopric of Trier, admitted that he wasn't prepared for "that kind of an onslaught". Zimmer insisted, however, that those who leave a message will be called back.

The hotline (0800-120-1000, free from within Germany) launched on Tuesday, is just one of many ways that the Catholic Church in Germany is attempting to win back trust even as the flood of abuse allegations shows no signs of receding. Bishops have insisted on full disclosure and have begun the process of reviewing church guidelines on reporting abuse allegations.

'Necessary Measures'

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday evening praised the church's efforts in an interview with RTL television. She said the hotline was a "very good" development and said she appreciated that German bishops have committed themselves to finding the truth. "There is no alternative to truth and clarity," she said, adding that the church has taken "the necessary measures".

This week, however, has been another difficult one for the Catholic Church in both Germany and elsewhere in continental Europe. Germany's national Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported allegations on Wednesday and Thursday that Augsburg Bishop Walter Mixa beat youth who lived at a children's home in the Bavarian town of Schrobenhausen when he was priest there in the 1970s. The paper has six declarations under oath of incidents of physical abuse, including slaps and punches to the head. "He punched me in the face with full force," the paper quotes a former resident, Jutta Stadler, now 47, as saying.

Earlier this week, the bishopric of Trier reported that 20 priests are suspected of having sexually abused children between the 1950s and 1990s. Bishop Stephan Ackermann, who was appointed last year, said on Monday that three of the cases had been passed on to public prosecutors, with two more soon to follow. He has asked potential further victims to come forward. "We want to investigate all leads," he said, calling the scandal "horrifying".

'Person of Faith'

Since initial reports of sexual abuse in Catholic schools emerged in Germany in late January, hundreds of victims have come forward in countries across Europe, including Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. Swiss bishops on Wednesday said that they had underestimated the problem and were now encouraging victims to contact the authorities. In a public admission of guilt, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn said in a service at St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna that "some of us talked about God, but did terrible things to our charges. Some of us perpetrated sexual violence. For some of us, the appearance of an infallible church was more important than anything else".

The new allegations come on the heels of a New York Times report last week which indicated that Pope Benedict XVI had known about one particularly egregious case in the United States. The Rev. Lawrence Murphy spent years molesting children at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, but when the case came to the attention of the Vatican many years later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then led by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became pope, declined to take action, citing Murphy's advanced age at the time.

The pope made no mention of the scandal during his pre-Easter mass at the Vatican on Thursday. But in reference to the Times article, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told the Associated Press that "the pope is a person of faith. He sees this as a test for him and the church". The pope was set to wash the feet of 12 priests on Thursday evening in a gesture of humility.

Even as much of the focus of the growing abuse scandal has been on the Catholic Church, cases from secular boarding schools have also been made public in recent weeks in Germany. In addition, more than 25 former residents of former East German children's homes have reported having been sexually abused during their time in the homes. Manfred Kolbe, a Christian Democratic parliamentarian whose constituency includes a memorial to a former East German youth re-education facility, told the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel that sexual abuse in children's homes "seems to have been widespread".

Spiegel Internacional