Cardinal Woelki had a PR firm draft a strategy before an expert report on the abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Cologne was published. According to a report, the advisors recommended that he get the Advisory Board on his side. The outrage is great.
Did Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki exploit victims of sexual abuse according to a “script” by PR experts? That is the question that is currently moving the largest German diocese of Cologne.
And that’s what it’s all about: in 2020, Woelki decided not to publish a long-announced report on how diocese officials deal with allegations of child sexual abuse. He cited legal reasons for this and commissioned a new report instead. The decision was highly controversial and drew massive criticism.
After all, the affected advisory board of the archdiocese initially supported Woelki’s approach. Then, however, the two advisory board spokesmen Patrick Bauer and Karl Haucke distanced themselves from it, resigned from their offices and accused Woelki of “renewed abuse of abuse victims”. “We were completely overrun,” Bauer said at the time.
Last week, the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” revealed that Woelki’s actions were apparently based on the recommendation of a communications agency. The PR strategists had therefore advised him to get the Advisory Board on his side because that would strengthen his position. It was already known that Woelki had paid 820,000 euros for the PR consultation – even though the Archdiocese itself has a large media department.
Woelki initially refused to comment on the report of the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”. Only when the criticism continued to swell and three deans – regional heads – demanded an explanation did something happen. Not Woelki himself, but at least his deputy, Vicar General Guido Assmann, spoke up. His message: The press is once again exaggerating something. It is true that the Archbishop used the services of a communications agency at the time, and of course they “worked for their money” and “developed scenarios”. That does not mean, however, that the Archdiocese has implemented all of these proposals.
No pressure whatsoever was exerted on the members of the Advisory Board for those affected prior to their vote. “The goal was never to encourage them to vote in a certain way,” assured Assmann. If that was later viewed differently, this only shows “that we have to be even more sensitive when dealing with those affected”. But all this is really not a “huge scandal”, even if some media portrayed it that way.
Patrick Bauer, one of the advisory board speakers who resigned at the time, sees things differently. He was “angry and angry” about Assmann’s statement, Bauer told the German Press Agency on Thursday. The point is that the archdiocese’s course of action was obviously clear from the outset and Woelki only wanted to get the blessing of those affected. This with the aim of appearing better in public – as his PR strategists would have recommended.
Bauer is particularly annoyed that Assmann warns in his statement that people should talk to each other and not about each other. “Since November 2020, neither Cardinal Woelki nor the then vicar general nor anyone from the communications department has spoken to me,” said Bauer. “I expect an apology for all of this and to this day that hasn’t happened.”
Bonn’s highest Catholic, City Dean Wolfgang Picken, expressly protects the media: “It is the experience of the last few years that without the educational work of the media and a critical debate in public there is not enough transparency about the abuse in the church and there would also be no successful prevention.” Instead of media criticism, the Archdiocese should rather be self-critical
