God weighs in on Love Parade tragedy

SO WHAT TOOK HIM so long? Finally, more than two weeks after the Love Parade disaster in Duisburg last month, God himself has added his two cents’ worth to the ongoing debate over responsibility. And according to the Almighty, the victims had it coming. 

The Lord didn’t make this statement personally, however. He just doesn’t work like that. Instead, He appointed his loyal and devout servant, His Grace, Andreas Laun, Auxiliary Bishop of Salzburg, to publish His thoughts for Him. Last Friday, Bishop Laun bestowed his own special kind of tough love on the victims of the Duisburg disaster via his regular online column. 

On July 24, the more than one million participants…

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Bishop’s resignation shifts attention to Protestant abuse

AFTER FOLLOWING THE NEWS stories of the past few months, you might have gained the impression that the Catholic Church is in essence a giant pedophile club. But this perception is unfair – not because it is untrue, but because it insinuates that Catholics have a monopoly on systemic child abuse. In fact, hierarchical religions of all kinds attract pedophiles to their ranks, including the Catholics’ main Central European competitor, Protestantism. A high-level resignation today once more casts a sombre light on what increasingly appears to be organized religion’s “original sin.”…

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The Bishop strikes back

THOSE NEWSPAPER READERS AMONG us who hoped thought we had seen the back of Augsburg bishop and chief army chaplain Walter Mixa last month were bemused to hear that the outspoken Bavarian is not only still hanging around the arena, he’s training for a comeback. 

The 69 year-old Mixa had long enjoyed a reputation as the Pope’s German bulldog, the Vatican’s “bad cop” in its efforts to maintain even a hint of its former influence over an increasingly secular and disaffected society. Whether it was a question of condemning pedophilia as a product of “the so-called sexual revolution” or depicting abortion as “worse than the Holocaust,” media manipulator Mixa was always on hand to deliver the necessary sound byte. But his own sullied past caught up with him earlier this year when former residents at a Church-run youth home in Schrobenhausen began accusing Mixa – a mere parish priest at the time – of submitting his young charges to brutal and byzantine punishments, literally “beating the Satan” out of an entire generation of helpless Bavarian orphans and runaways in the 1970s and 80s…

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The case against Walter Mixa: Nothing but “hot air”?

Former Augsburg Bishop Walter Mixa

FORMER AUGSBURG BISHOP WALTER Mixa, who recently resigned from the Catholic Church after being confronted with child abuse, embezzlement, and pedophile accusations, can finally rest easy in his Swiss clinic: at least the sex charges appear to be overblown, if not outright false. According to the Nürnberger Nachrichten, Mixa’s lawyer has stated that the preliminary investigation against his client had yielded nothing but “hot air.” Sources close to the newspaper said the investigation was likely to be dropped in the coming days. A statement is expected tomorrow. (I have been covering the Mixa story regularly on my blog.)

The “case” against Mixa stems from a lone denunciation by two employees in the education department of the diocese of Eichstätt, where Mixa had served as bishop from 1996 to 2005, directly to the diocese in Augsburg, which sent it on to the Bavarian state prosecutor’s office in Munich, bypassing the normal channels. A young man called Marco Schneider, who was supposedly the target of Mixa’s alleged abuse, announced over the weekend that the charges were entirely untrue…

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Catholic Bishop Walter Mixa inherits the wind

GERMAN BISHOP WALTER MIXA probably hoped his worries were at an end when he finally submitted his resignation to the Pope on April 21 of this year. In fact, they’re only just beginning. The reactionary and egregiously controversial bishop of Augsburg, who quit under fire for alleged beatings and financial malfeasance at a juvenile center in the Bavarian town of Schrobenhausen, had already generated lurid headlines earlier this year when he blamed the Catholic Church’s spiraling pedophile scandal on “the so-called sexual revolution.” But it seems that this alleged revolution of personal morality also took a toll on Mixa himself, because as of today the public prosecutor in the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt is formally accusing Mixa of sexually exploiting an underage altar boy. And this time the paper trail leads all the way back to Pope Benedict XVI…

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“My heart is pure”: Bishop Mixa confronts an abusive past

Bishop Walter Mixa

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE ONCE wrote that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. While it’s unclear whether the Catholic Church’s sluggish response to the current child molestation scandal represents a reform process of any kind, there is no doubt that this badly-supervised organization is indeed entering a dangerous moment in its history. Take the case of German bishop Walter Mixa, who is himself facing child abuse charges of a different kind that may open the Church up to a tsunami of public embarrassment and costly lawsuits.

Walter Mixa, the Bishop of the Bavarian town of Augsburg and Germany’s high profile “military bishop” responsible for the pastoral care of the German armed forces, is the sort of clergyman the German press loves…

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