Catholic priests, despite the community suspicion fuelled by widespread child sex abuse revelations, are no more likely to be paedophiles than other men, a top criminologist investigating Church abuse in Germany has said.
A German appeals court on Monday upheld renegade British bishop Richard Williamson's conviction for Holocaust denial, but reduced the fine ordered by a lower court to €6,500 ($9,262).
The Catholic Church in Germany plans to open up a decade of personnel files to criminologist researchers, according to a magazine report, in a bid to facilitate an independent investigation into sexual abuse at Church-run institutions.
Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to his birth country in September is booking out, with one church service already oversubscribed by eager Catholic worshippers and more than 120,000 ticket requests logged for his five public events.
German gay and lesbian groups are outraged at an item posted on the website of an association of Catholic doctors that offers psychotherapy and homeopathic treatment for homosexuality.
Want to see the pope during his visit to Germany in September? Those interested in attending services in Berlin, Erfurt or Freiburg can now register online, Catholic Church officials have announced.
The number of Catholics quitting the church jumped 40 percent last year to 180,000 in the wake of persistent child sex abuse scandals, a media report said Thursday.
Facing a dire shortage of priests, influential voices in Germany have begun questioning some central tenets of the Catholic Church including celibacy for the clergy. Kyle James reports.
Victims of sex abuse at Jesuit schools are finally being offered concrete compensation payouts one year after the abuse scandal was revealed, a Catholic official said Monday.
Rocked by scandal and seeing its flock shrink, the Catholic Church should actively begin proselytizing in Germany, according to the Archbishop of Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx.
Three masked bandits dragged a 47-year-old Catholic priest from his bed and beat him severely on Tuesday night during an armed robbery in the state of Hesse, police have announced.
Pope Benedict XVI plans to visit Berlin in September 2011, and even has a parliamentary address on his agenda. But the city's Catholic officials fear the pontiff will draw embarrassingly small crowds and may not hold any public services.
A report on abuse by clergy in Pope Benedict’s former Archbishopric of Munich shows that at least 159 priests were suspected of sexual or physical abuse while the actual number is thought to be considerably higher.
As the Vatican prepares for a historic meeting Friday to confront sex abuse by priests, Germany is struggling to hammer out a compensation plan in the wake of scandals that rocked the Church this year.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Thursday found that an employee of the German Catholic Church dismissed for adultery had received inadequate treatment by German courts.
Robert Zollitsch, Germany's most senior Roman Catholic bishop, said on Monday the Church had "failed" in its response to victims of sexual abuse by its priests.
German prosecutors said Tuesday they had charged a Catholic priest with raping an underage girl after a tip-off from a special body set up to combat abuse scandals that have rocked the Church.
A leading German theologian has been barred from the prestigious papal academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas after admitting he was gay, media reported Wednesday.
The world's first female Lutheran bishop resigned Friday after abuse accusations in her diocese of Hamburg, the latest casualty of a scandal to have rocked Christian churches in Germany.
A German Benedictine Abbot who resigned in February amid the Catholic child abuse scandal for failing to properly report abuse accusations is already set to return to his former post, media reported Tuesday.
A married man was ordained as a Catholic priest in the southern German city of Regensburg this week in a rare exception to the church’s rules of celibacy for men of the cloth, the diocese reported.
In a dramatic capitulation, former Bishop Walter Mixa abandoned any attempt to claw back his old job on Wednesday and issued an abject apology to the people he had “not treated the right way.”
