GERMAN FOREIGN MINISTER TACKLES CHILD SEX ABUSE WITH POPE FRANCIS

In the first private audience of a German foreign minister with the pope in almost 20 years, Heiko Maas on Wednesday addressed the sensitive issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Michael Fischer reported for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).

The meeting with 84-year-old Pope Francis lasted a lengthy 40 minutes and, according to Maas, also touched on the latest flare-up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the coronavirus pandemic, the future of the European Union and Germany's Latin America policy.

Maas had said before meeting Francis that he wanted to talk about the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. In March, an 800-page report looking onto the archdiocese of Cologne threw the issue into the spotlight in Germany.

It found that, between 1975 and 2018, a total of 202 people within the archdiocese were suspected of involvement in abuse, and that 63 percent of those accused were clerics.

A number of bishops and other church officials were suspended or offered their resignation in the wake of the release of the report, which also cited negligence on part of the archdiocese's leadership when dealing with abuse allegations.

Maas declined to say what the pope had to say about the sex abuse scandals: "I am not authorized to announce here what the Pope has said on this subject. But it is certainly a topic that is not unknown here in the Vatican."

The German foreign minister stressed that coming to terms with the abuse was not the sole responsibility of the church. The state could not stay out of this issue, he said, "if there are victims who have a right to expect that the perpetrators must be held accountable."

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