Bishop resigns over abuses in German Catholic Church

BERLIN – Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a bishop who came under fire for his handling of abuses in the German Catholic Church.

Franz-Josef Bode, the bishop of Osnabrück, a city in north-western Germany, admitted in a personal statement to having made mistakes. He will also leave the Osnabrück diocese.

Pope Francis accepted a letter of resignation from the bishop, the Vatican said, without giving a reason. A victims’ council accused Bode of declaring a case of sexualized violence against minors as a “relationship” as recently as last year.

In December, the council called in the Vatican and filed a complaint against Bode, saying his attitude was still more perpetrator-oriented than victim-oriented.

Also counting against Bode are his actions regarding cases of abuse in the diocese of Osnabrück. In one case, a priest had been sexually abusing a girl in a parish for years. The experts who drew up a recent report accused Bode of having given the priest a leadership position in youth work in the same year that the girl reported the man to the bishop.

“I expressly acknowledge my responsibility as well as my personal mistakes and today I can only ask all those affected again for forgiveness,” Bode said in video message on Saturday.

He admitted that he had lost the confidence of many in the diocese and said he hoped his departure would help it move forward.

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Until now, Bode had admitted mistakes but ruled out resigning.

“The decision to resign has grown on me over the last few months.”

According to a spokesman for Bode, the Osnabrück bishop had approached the Vatican some time ago with a request to resign, but had only wanted to make it public if Pope Francis accepted it.

The chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzing, acknowledged the resignation with “great regret and respect,” the conference announced in a statement.

Bode, 72, was the longest-serving active bishop in Germany. He received his ordination in 1991. In November 1995, he became bishop of Osnabrück.