Berlin - Germany's justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, urged the country's top Catholic bishop Thursday to ensure that all sex-abuse allegations are reported to police. She was meeting with Robert Zollitsch, archbishop of Freiburg, at her Berlin office. Both said they had got over a public row a month ago about the sex scandal and allegations that the church had covered up cases of priests who hit or groped children.
German church guidelines only require bishops to report proven and recent cases of rape to police.
This week, the Vatican explicitly said for the first time that all crimes by clergy must be reported to civil authorities.
The minister and the leader of the German bishops said they agreed that past abuse should be "comprehensively and resolutely" investigated, with the church cooperating with both the police and complainants.
"They have a right to honest explanations," the two said in a statement.
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told the bishop she would not allow the church's internal disciplinary procedures to delay or hinder police inquiries. She urged the Catholic bishops to change the guidelines.
Currently the guidelines only require a bishop to call police if there is solid evidence against a priest and a case does not yet fall under the statute of limitations. Bishops have said they will change this.
The church has traditionally disciplined clergy under its code of canon law and treated this as if it prevails over civil law.
Wolfgang Beinert, a University of Regensburg Catholic theology professor who is close friend of Pope Benedict XVI, told the German Press Agency dpa in an interview that the church was facing epochal change.
"This order to refer sex abuse cases to the public prosecutors amounts in effect to the church abandoning its traditional doctrine of being a 'societas perfecta', a self-contained society," he said.
Beinert, who studied theology under Benedict, forecast that the Benedict papacy would be a bridge to changes in the church which gave a greater role to lay people and altered approaches to sexual ethics.
"His successor at least will have to open up the church better to modern society," Beinert said.
Hans Kueng, the Swiss-born dissident Catholic theologian who lives in Tuebingen, Germany, called in an open letter Thursday for German bishops to rebel and force Benedict to accept changes in the church.
He said, "Unlimited obedience can never be given to a human authority, but only to God himself." Kueng said bishops should start by refusing to automatically laicize priests who marry.
