Cardinal Woelki is heavily burdened by an employee of the Archdiocese of Cologne. He is said to have had a list of cases of abuse as early as 2015, while he affirms under oath that he only found out about it in 2022. Leading Catholics are calling for a leave of absence.
After the investigations against Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki for alleged perjury became known, there were more and more voices calling for a decision on the future of the Archbishop of Cologne. The development was the “absolute low point,” said Maria Mesrian, spokeswoman for the Maria 2.0 initiative, to the “Rheinische Post”. “The cardinal should have a good sense of the muddled situation in the diocese and let his offices rest for the time being,” she told the newspaper.
The investigations by the public prosecutor’s office deal with the question of when Woelki was dealt with in the abuse case of the former “Sternsinger” boss Winfried Pilz. Woelki himself had stated that he only found out about it in the fourth week of June 2022. The assistant to the former head of human resources, Hildegard Dahm, contradicted this: In 2015, she had already created a list for Woelki with the names of 14 priests who had been accused of abuse. It also had Pilz’s name on it.
After her boss’s appointment with the cardinal, she asked him what Woelki had said about the list. He replied: “That didn’t interest the cardinal at all.” When the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” pointed out that Woelki said that he was only dealt with the Pilz case in June 2022, Dahm replied: “That is not true. It may be that he looked at the sheet with Pilz and the other 13 name. But I looked into it. Absolutely. That’s why I was so appalled by the cardinal’s self-portrayal to the public.”
The Archdiocese of Cologne went over to the counter-offensive in a statement published on Wednesday evening. Woelki’s spokesman said he personally had the suspicion that the cardinal would be “pilloried again by interested circles with age-old stories that have long since been clarified” before his upcoming visit to the Pope in Rome next week. The Archdiocese will examine labor law steps against Dahm: “Because she reported from the sensitive area of ??personnel management and used her position of trust for this. That is strictly prohibited and no employer can tolerate that.” In terms of content, the Archdiocese pointed out that Dahm himself said in the interview that she was not sure whether Woelki had even looked at the list she had created. Woelki never assured that Pilz’s name was not on a list drawn up by anyone. Rather, he had assured that he had not known his file.
For Tim Kurzbach, chairman of the diocesan council, “a house of untruths is now collapsing”. One of the “terrible findings” was that Cardinal Woelki admitted that he had ignored a list of active abusers “just to defend himself,” he complained in the “Rheinische Post”. Irme Stetter-Karp, President of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), told the newspaper: “An end with horror instead of horror without end would have long been advisable in Cologne.” She said the latest developments in the archdiocese are “just another in a long line of disturbing events.”
According to Stetter-Karp, the fact that the public prosecutor’s office is investigating Woelki and that an employee is heavily incriminating him is “an unbearable situation, because we all know that the bond of trust between the cardinal and the faithful in the Archdiocese of Cologne has long been overstrained”.