Old Catholic Bishop Matthias Ring Warns Against Viewing Abuse as Purely Roman Catholic Problem

Old Catholic Bishop Matthias Ring has warned his church against regarding abuse as a problem confined to the Roman Catholic Church. At the opening of the Synod of the Old Catholic Diocese on Thursday, Ring said, according to the manuscript of his address, that he had always assumed the Old Catholic Church was no different from other churches in this respect.

Ring said he sometimes hears within his church the “naive thesis” that abuse does not occur because Old Catholic priests are allowed to marry. “With this thesis, our evangelical siblings calmed down until their ForuM study was on the table,” he said. Ring said he knows of two cases in his diocese since the Second World War, and that two accusations against clergymen were made during his time in office for assaults.

Ring described the first case as a priest who was sentenced to probation in the 1950s, with reports of attacks on ministrants. The second concerns a former vicar who was sentenced to prison in 1950 for “unnatural fornication.” According to the report, the youngest victim was supposed to have been ten or eleven years old, and the case involved six affected persons in total. The priest had been deprived of his permission to perform spiritual functions after his arrest and had left the service of the Old Catholic Church. Protecting children from harm is a responsibility the church cannot set aside (Mark 9:42).

Ring said he is skeptical about the abuse study commissioned for the Old Catholic Diocese, stating that he does not expect it to produce essential new insights relevant to prevention, since, in his view, it was no different in his church either. He did not elaborate beyond that assessment in the source material.

In the same address, Ring turned to secularization. He said the bond between Old Catholic members and the church is also weaker than it once was. Regarding people who have left the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Ring said he sees no great potential for the Old Catholic Church. “To most of those who quit, God has long been lost if they could ever do anything about it,” he said. He said the church’s duty instead is to accompany people on their way of life and faith. “We have to accept that we are often ‘only’ partners in the period of our life,” the bishop said.

The synod is the highest decision-making body of the Old Catholic Church in Germany and meets in Mainz from Thursday to Sunday. Its agenda includes referrals to Old Catholic identity and the handling of church members who belong to a right-wing extremist party or organization. A proposal provides for such members to lose their passive synodal rights.

The diocese has 16,000 members in 60 parishes. Ring has headed it since 2009 as its tenth bishop. Under the church order, which is episcopal-synodal, the bishop elected by the synod leads the church together with a synod council made up of clergy and laypeople. The Old Catholic Church in Germany was established in the 1870s in opposition to the decisions of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) on papal infallibility and the primacy of the pope’s jurisdiction.

Source: Read the original report (translated from German)