Cologne law professor Stephan Rixen considers the agreement between the German Bishops' Conference and the federal government to deal with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church to be inadequate. The constitutional state thus accepts "without hesitation the quasi-autocratic internal structure of the Catholic Church," Rixen writes in a guest article in the "Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger" on Wednesday, July 20. "Separation of powers is a foreign word here." The director of the Institute for Constitutional Law at the University of Cologne called for federal and state laws that "democratically legitimize and control" the processing.
Above all, the composition of the independent investigation commissions in the dioceses urgently needs to be “controlled more by the rule of law”, Rixen emphasized. Otherwise, their independence would become a mere facade and they would “at best do a placebo workup”.
In 2020, the Catholic German Bishops' Conference and the Federal Government's independent commissioner for questions of child sexual abuse, Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, concluded an agreement to set up a commission in each diocese to deal with the matter. The members are appointed partly by the church, partly by the respective state government and all appointed by the local bishop.
What "independent" means is determined by the respective bishop at his own, unverifiable discretion, criticized Rixen, who was himself appointed by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as a member of the independent review commission for the Archdiocese of Cologne. The lawyer spoke of a "questionable arrangement between state and church".
The state is hiding behind the supposedly tried and tested cooperation with the churches, and they are only happy to misunderstand their right to self-determination, which is guaranteed in the Basic Law, as a protective shield to ward off state control power. "If the rule of law does not take responsibility, the Catholic Church will fail," Rixen warned.
