Catholic cardinal Walter Brandmüller blames gay people for child abuse
Catholic cardinal Walter Brandmüller
German cardinal Walter Brandmüller has blamed gay people for child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church.
Brandmüller, the Cardinal-Deacon of San Giuliano dei Fiamminghi, made the claim in an interview published by German-language news agency DPA on January 4, to mark his 90th birthday.
In the interview, the Cardinal claimed that the public’s response to sex abuse scandals have been “hypocritical,” claiming that “what has happened to abuse in the church is nothing other than what happens in society at all.”
Catholic cardinal Walter Brandmüller spoke to DPA to mark his 90th birthday. (The Holy See)
Brandmüller went on to claim that it is “statistically proven” that homosexuality is linked to sex abuse.
He also claimed that “80 percent of the cases of sexual assault in the church affected male youths, not children.”
Attempting to link homosexuality to paedophilia is a tactic commonly employed by homophobic hate groups.
Report found ‘systemic’ cover-up of child sex abuse in German Catholic church
A report on sex abuse in the German Catholic church published in 2018 implicated 1,670 clerics in alleged incidents of abuse against 3,677 children.
The investigation of sex abuse between 1946 and 2014 detailed how the Catholic church failed to tackle the crisis, finding that priests accused of abuse were “systematically” moved to other parishes in an attempt to conceal their crimes.
Despite Brandmüller’s claim that the majority of victims were “not children,” the study found that more than half of the victims had been younger than 13 the first time they were abused.
60% of abusive priests did not face punishment.
The Catholic Church globally has faced criticism over attempts to cover up allegations of child sexual abuse.
In August 2018, a different German cardinal blamed the child sex abuse scandal on the “moral depravity” of gay people.
In an interview with anti-LGBT Catholic website LifeSiteNews, cardinal Gerhard Müller blamed the child sex abuse scandal on a gay “mafia.”
He claimed that “a homosexual network was able to wreak havoc in a mafia-like manner in the Church is connected with the underestimation of the moral depravity of homosexual acts among adults.”
Müller described homosexuality as a “disorder,” saying: “In my view, there do not exist homosexual men or even priests. God has created the human being as man and woman.”
“But there can be men and women with disordered passions.
“Sexual communion has its place exclusively in the marriage between a man and a woman.
“Outside, there is only fornication and abuse of sexuality, both either with persons of the opposite sex, or in the unnatural intensification of sin with persons of the same sex.”
