BERLIN - German prosecutors Monday opened a criminal investigation against a Roman Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing a teen-age boy, launching what was believed to be the first such case in Germany since a wave of sex-abuse scandals engulfed the church.
The Mainz diocese announced the priest's suspension Sunday and pledged a full inquiry of its own after a German magazine reported on the allegations against him. The western diocese near Frankfurt is the seat of Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the head of the German Bishops' Conference.
Prosecutors began investigating possible charges on one count of sexual abuse involving a 14-year-old after being notified of the allegations by the diocese Friday, said Ger Neuber, a spokesman for prosecutors in the city of Darmstadt. He said the priest denies the allegations.
While German priests have in the past decade been convicted of abusing children, no major sex-abuse scandal has hit the German church even as such cases reached to the highest levels of the clergy in countries such as the United States, Poland and France.
The weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that the priest sexually abused a boy starting in 1988, when he was a 14-year-old server in his parish, and subsequently had faced similar allegations.
The priest was summoned in 1999 by the diocese's personnel chief for "discreet talks" on allegations of sexual misconduct, but no action was taken after he denied them, the report said. He also denied suspicions that he abused another 14-year-old boy after a transfer in 2000, said Der Spiegel, which identified the priest as Norbert E., 47.
The Mainz diocese received complaints about the priest's youth work in the past, spokesman Guenther Gremp said. But no sexual abuse allegations were leveled until a group dealing with abused children wrote to Lehmann in June, he said.
The priest was suspended late last month and was now at a monastery, Gremp said. He refused to identify the priest.
Neuber said the priest disputes the allegations and himself wants prosecutors to look into them. He said he did not have details of the case, but believed the alleged offense was recent.
If the priest were charged and convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.
Lehmann, who is the Bishop of Mainz, said in a statement Sunday that the church will "investigate this report swiftly and intensively and will not shy away from taking the appropriate steps if necessary."
In April, Germany's Roman Catholic bishops agreed to study the need for new guidelines on handling clergy sex abuse of minors after a spate of scandals in several countries, but insisted that several cases discovered in Germany do not indicate a widespread problem.
Lehmann said measures would be approved by a September assembly of the German Bishops' Conference.
"We should ask ourselves self-critically whether we should not proceed even more vigorously," he said. "The church, like society, is in a learning process on this serious problem."
In April, a German bishop resigned for the first time in a sex-abuse case. A woman had charged that 58-year-old Franziskus Eisenbach, an assistant bishop in Mainz, sexually exploited her and injured her during an exorcism.
In 1999, a priest in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in jail after being convicted on 59 counts of sexually abusing two boys and a girl, ages 10 to 14.
A Catholic priest in the northern German town of Meppen was convicted in 1996 of abusing 14 young boys over an eight-year period.