BERLIN - Germany's Roman Catholic church must deal aggressively with sexual abuse of children by clergy, the top church official said in comments published Monday, just as the latest in a string of new cases came to light.
"Looking at it objectively, we probably should expect more revelations of this kind," Cardinal Karl Lehmann wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.
Church officials said last week that four priests in Germany were being investigated on suspicion of abusing children, one of whom has been charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy in 1998.
On Monday, the western diocese of Essen said it had stripped a priest of his office after he admitted abusing a teen-age boy when he was a chaplain 22 years ago.
The man, who was not identified, headed a church-run home for the disabled in Essen and was sent into retirement.
Auxiliary bishop Franz Grave said the man had been the subject of an abortive church inquiry after the victim took his allegations to the diocese in 1993, conceding at a news conference that the closing of the inquiry was "certainly a failure from today's point of view."
Grave said the abuse began after the victim, then aged 13, approached the chaplain to complain of sexual approaches by another priest. It continued until the victim broke off contact with the chaplain at age 17.
Some German priests have been convicted of abusing children in the past decade, but no major sex-abuse scandal has hit the German church — in contrast to other countries such as the United States and Poland.
"We must ask ourselves self-critically whether we have always succeeded in fulfilling the need to act in individual cases," Lehmann said in his column Monday. "It is time to proceed even more energetically and effectively" against pedophilia, he said.
He said the German church needs common guidelines to prevent and deal with abuse, as well as greater involvement by external experts.
Lehmann has said he expects such steps to be approved at a September assembly of the German Bishops' Conference.
German bishops agreed in April to study the need for new guidelines on handling clergy's sex abuse of minors, but insisted that cases discovered in Germany do not indicate a widespread problem.
Still, the Essen diocese's Grave estimated Monday that up to 300 priests in Germany, out of a total 18,000, may have been involved in child abuse cases.
Lehmann wrote that allegations of abuse in Germany "shock the church in this country just as in the United States, even if there are far less cases here."
However, he insisted that it isn't easy to unearth cases of abuse, because "the pedophile generally denies (it) just as long as he can."
"It is only too easy — but still wrong — to speak quickly of a cover-up in view of these difficulties," Lehmann said.