Benedict XVI he was not particularly loved by some parts of German public opinion. There death, which took place a year and a half ago, did not make this feeling disappear completely. The story of the is emblematic civil case filed against him in the summer of 2022 by a victim by the former priest Peter Hullermann, convicted in 1986 of pedophilia and who was reported for similar episodes in 1979 while working in the diocese of Essen.
The pedophile priest
In 1980 Hullermann, sent to undergo psychotherapeutic therapy in the area, asked for hospitality from the archdiocese of Munich and Freising. During a meeting, the then cardinal archbishop Joseph Ratzinger agreed to the granting of accommodation but requiring that the priest not be used for pastoral activities. This prohibition by Ratzinger, however, was not respected and Hullermann returned to molesting minors. The then vicar general Gerhard Gruber assumed responsibility for this negligence, but one victim in any case decided to take the ninety-year-old Benedict XVI to court for a request for compensation for damages.
About a month before his death, Joseph Ratzinger had said he was ready to testify in the trial that was supposed to be held in the provincial court of Traunstein. One of the last disappointments experienced by the German Pope during his lifetime, forced to defend himself in a public letter after a “mess-up” by his team of collaborators who had denied his presence at the 1980 meeting even though he had already has been publishing for years. A defense that did not come in the context of the subsequent civil case, but as a result of what emerged in the investigation commissioned by the archdiocese of Munich and Freising into cases of abuse from 1945 onwards and which also concerned the years in which Ratzinger had been archbishop. Benedict XVI, now Pope Emeritus, had expressed “pain from abuse and errors that occurred during the time of my tenure in the respective places.”
The civil case and the inheritance
The elderly Pontiff did not have time to give his testimony in the civil proceedings brought against him because in the meantime he died the last day of 2022. The appellant, however, did not stop and decided to continue the proceedings. Once Ratzinger died, the victim’s lawyer wanted to ask for compensation for damages from his heirs. However, a few days ago the Higher Regional Court of Munich dampened the applicant’s hopes with one judgment in which he claimed not to be aware of the “existence of an inheritance” of Ratzinger and stated that German justice is not obliged to look for possible heirs to be involved in the civil proceedings. The Bavarian court, declaring itself exempt, invited the appellant to turn to Vatican justice to search for Benedict XVI’s heirs.
An indication disputed by the lawyer who judged “the ruling of the OLG (the regional court, ed.) of Munich insufficient” is that “ignores the fact that a German citizen cannot access a Vatican hereditary tribunal to appoint a representative under Vatican law.” The story does not end here: the lawyer, in fact, has announced his intention to do so appeal and of wanting to bring Frontr’s complaint to the German Federal Constitutional Court.
The looming civil proceedings have complicated things for the succession of Benedict XVI and have made it difficult for the five cousins still alive to accept the remaining inheritance consisting of a small sum in a bank account because the two houses of his property would have already passed to the institute that bears his name.
