DThe public prosecutor’s office in Cologne has refused to initiate preliminary proceedings against Archbishop Rainer Maria Cardinal Woelki on suspicion of false testimony under oath. After examining several reports, senior public prosecutor Ulf Willuhn came to the conclusion that the cardinal’s claim must be correct that he “was only dealt with the case (of the abuse priest Winfried) Pilz by the Archdiocese of Cologne in the 4th week of June”.
A few weeks ago, Deutschlandfunk and the Zeit supplement “Christ und Welt” published a letter in which the cardinal’s office manager, dated May 6, 2022, asked a person affected whether they could come to the Archbishop’s Office for a conversation at the end of June could come home to Cologne.
From the phrase “The Cardinal asked me to inquire with you”, the authors of the articles concluded that, contrary to what was stated in the affidavits of August 4th and 12th, Woelki had already learned about acts of abuse by priest Pilz at the beginning of May. Based on these reports, the Cologne public prosecutor’s office received several complaints against Woelki.
The Cologne judiciary now rejected the journalistic conclusions “on the basis of the standards to be applied in a preliminary examination procedure by the public prosecutor’s office based on objectivity” and recognized a “lack of consistency in content”.
According to information from the FAZ, Willuhn, on the other hand, considered the statement by the Cologne criminal lawyer Björn Gercke to be credible, according to which the phrase “The Lord Cardinal asked me …” by no means suggests that Woelki was personally involved with the Pilz case in May.
According to legal counsel Woelkis to the public prosecutor’s office, the report by the journalists is a fact that borders on “false suspicion”, since it is “obvious” that the office manager “sent the letter on her own”.
In autumn 2020, Gercke was asked by the Archdiocese of Cologne to draw up an “independent report” on how to deal with cases of sexual violence instead of the Munich law firm WSW. Gercke was not able to identify any significant breaches of duty by Woelkis in the report presented in March 2021.
For their part, according to information from the FAZ, the Cologne public prosecutor’s office did not consider it appropriate to form their own picture of what was happening in Woelki’s environment, whether by questioning the office manager or by requesting the relevant files on the Pilz case.