Ho-hum. Another priest accused of pedophilia? This has become so common that it is hardly newsworthy. The difference here is that the priest under discussion is Walter Mixa, the Bishop of Augsburg. Mixa was hand-picked by Pope Benedict XVI for he represented his vision of the church: reactionary, unyielding, a hard-liner when it came to church doctrine as dictated by Rome.
Earlier this year as the child sexual abuse scandal in the church began to unfold, Mixa attracted a great deal of attention in the press by blaming the priestly pedophilia on the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s: it was all the fault of dirty hippies. In his sermons, which were admired in Rome, Mixa would rail against the "atheists" who had created "hell on earth". But it turns out that Mixa had created his own hell on earth as the rector of a school in Bavaria:
In Germany, Hildegard Sedlmayr, 48, a former resident of the home in the Bavarian town of Schrobenhausen, where Bishop Mixa was a priest, told Süddeutsche Zeitung that at age 15, the bishop dragged her from her bed and punched her repeatedly on the arm.
"He grabbed me by the nightshirt, pulled me up out of my bed and punched me repeatedly on the upper arm. Afterwards it was covered in bruises," she said. "The two years at St Josef's were the worst in my life."
Another former St Josef's resident, named as Thomas Huber, said he was in pain for "several days" after Bishop Mixa flogged him. "I was made to bend over a bench, then Mixa hit me 35 times with a carpet beater," he said.
Three other former residents said Bishop Mixa habitually punished children with slaps to the face, punches to the arms, and beatings. The former residents claimed that Catholic nuns who ran the home also hit children with brooms and wooden shoes.
"The children whose parents never visited the home were the ones who were beaten most," said one former resident, named as Markus Tagwerk. "Over the years, Mixa pulled down my trousers and beat me hard on the behind on at least 50 separate occasions," he said.
But the child-beating allegedly happened more than 30 years ago, and Bishop Mixa couldn't recall the children, his memory of those days was fuzzy. The most recent allegations of sexual abuse, however, stem from his time as Bishop of Eichstaett, from 1996-2000 before Benedict promoted him to the diocese of Augsburg.
German prosecutors and church officials said on Friday authorities were investigating accusations of sexual abuse by Mixa, who had already offered to step down after being accused of hitting children.
A spokesman for the diocese of Eichstaett said the accusations referred to a time between 1996 and 2000 when Mixa was bishop of Eichstaett, which like Augsburg is in predominantly Catholic Bavaria.
Besides beating and abusing shildren, it appears that Benedict's man in Augsburg just may have been the "Ted Haggard of Germany" - condemning gays and lesbians from the pulpit while having sex with young seminarians in his custom-built sauna.
Now Benedict's friend and standard-bearer has retreated to a rehab clinic in Switzerland. Will the pope reflect on his decision to promote a sadist and apparent pedophile because he hewed to the Vatican's reactionary world-view?