IIn room 142 of the Cologne Regional Court, one of the largest in the house, many a spectacular trial has already been conducted. And not only many a defendant, but also many a witness will have appeared there over the years who had never dreamed of his life that he would ever have to give a public account of his actions.
On this Thursday everything comes together and makes most of those present “freeze cold”, just as the presiding judge at the regional court Christoph Kaufmann said while studying the case files: Here Hans-Bernhard Ue ., a Catholic priest who, according to what we know so far, has been assaulting pre-pubescent girls for decades, there is a witness named Günter Assenmacher who conjures up “aporia” and “dilemma”. He was not just any little wheel in the great machinery of the diocese, but held the post of chief judge in the Archdiocese of Cologne for more than 25 years. As such, he not only dealt with hundreds of nullity proceedings a year, but also with the canonical sanctioning of clergymen who had offended children or young people.
Nieces under family pressure
But there have not been many of these in the Archdiocese of Cologne in recent years, if you take Assenmacher’s information at face value. Since 1995 he has been involved in a good 20 criminal proceedings as a so-called official, the now 69-year-old clergyman lectures with an undertone that is supposed to make the audience believe that he is basically a very small light and that he only has to appear in court today because of that because he was too helpful. But not with regard to the accused, who was suspended from his priestly duties in accordance with the rules in autumn 2010 after anonymous allegations of abuse and the archdiocese’s inspection of the files of the public prosecutor’s office. Assenmacher, who studied theology with him for two years, claims never to have spoken personally to the accused during the period in question – which Ue. according to the protocol of a survey in the Cologne Vicariate General in April 2019. No, the man with the carefully coiffed white hair gives the impression on the witness chair that in retrospect he would have done nothing better than to give advice out of friendliness, which he was convinced at the time.
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Because instead of reporting a suspected case to the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as has been prescribed since 2001, the report is in the Ue case. did not take place at his instigation. And that, although the legal advisor Daniela Sch., Who was responsible for the contact with the state judiciary as well as with the legal counsel of the persons concerned, together with the then head of the main department pastoral care personnel, the today’s Archbishop of Hamburg Stefan Heße, was still responsible for ways had been looking for a canonical proceeding against Ue. initiated when the possibilities of state criminal prosecution had long been exhausted. This had to discontinue the investigation without result after the three nieces, who had accused their uncle of serious sexual abuse, had exercised their right to refuse to testify under massive family pressure. The justiciary tried to get in touch with one of the lawyers of those affected, but received the notification in spring 2011 that she was not currently in a position to make a statement in a church proceeding.
For Assenmacher and Heße, this information came in handy. Despite all the pressures of the legal advisor, Assenmacher did nothing to initiate a church preliminary investigation. Heße, in turn, had already recorded the hopeful expectation in writing at the end of 2010, should the public prosecutor’s office discontinue the proceedings, Ue could. be rehabilitated immediately. A year later the time had come. Ue. returned to his position as hospital chaplain in Wuppertal. Four years later, Archbishop Joachim Cardinal Meisner appointed him deputy city dean.
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