One of Benedict XVI's first acts as pope was to promote Walter Mixa to Bishop of Augsburg. Here was a man the new pope could trust: reactionary, a hard-liner who preached absolute obedience to Vatican doctrine and warned of the evils of the "dictatorship of relativism" that was taking over Germany and Europe. And Bishop Mixa did not disappoint. The wise men of Rome were thrilled as he roared from the pulpit in Augsburg about how legalized abortion was worse than the Holocaust, about how child-care subsidies reduce women to "baby machines", about how atheists had created "hell on earth". Things began to unravel for Bishop Mixa this year as the church sex abuse scandal unfolded in Germany. Predictably, Mixa tried to deflect the blame for priestly pedophilia on the "68ers" – i.e. the "dirty hippies" and their sexual revolution. But then came the revelations that Mixa had beaten children while serving as rector of Bavarian school in the 1970s and early 1980s – creating his own "hell on earth" for the boys and girls enrolled there. The final straw came late last week as new accusations surfaced that Mixa had sexually abused an alter boy while he served as Bishop of Eichstaett in 1996.
Walter Mixa, appointed Bishop of Augsburg by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005,
submitted his resignation last month after former residents of a
Bavarian Catholic children's home accused him of routinely beating them
decades ago. The new allegations are the first against him to involve
sexual abuse, and stem from the time he served as bishop of the German
diocese Eichstått, between 1996 and 2005, a diocese official said. They
are also the first sexual-abuse allegations to be directed at a German
bishop amid Europe's widening clerical abuse scandal.
But it doesn't end there. For it now appears that Bishop Mixa was the Ted Haggard of Germany – condemning gays and lesbians from the pulpit while having sex with young seminarians in his custom-built sauna.
The case of Walter Mixa is more than just yet another example of the Vatican's dysfunctional human resources management. It touches on the core of the role of a medieval institution – the authoritarian church – in a modern democracy. Peter Wensierski writes about this in Der Spiegel:
Die Gesellschaft und der Staat aber sollten sich fragen, warum sie
einem wie Mixa aus Steuergeldern eigentlich das Gehalt bezahlt haben
und wie lange man noch die Parallelwelt der katholischen Kirche
alimentieren will – eine Institution, in der es nach eigenem
Selbstverständnis keine Demokratie gibt, keine Frauen in
Leitungsämtern, keine wirkliche finanzielle Transparenz – dafür aber
Ausgrenzung und Diffamierung von ganzen gesellschaftlichen Gruppen wie
Homosexuelle und obendrein noch geheimgehaltene schwarze Kassen wie die
des "Bischöflichen Stuhls".(Society and the state need to question why taxpayers subsidize the salary of someone like Mixa and how much longer will we support the parallel world of the Catholic Church – an institution which by its own self-understanding eschews democracy, prohibits women in leadership positions, and rejects any financial transparency while demonizing and marginalizing entire social groups such as homosexuals even while establishing secret slush funds such as those for the "Bishop's Chair".)
Now Benedict's friend and protege has entered a rehab center in Switzerland. Will the pope reflect on how it came to pass that he promoted an alcoholic sadist and child molester into a key position in the church?
