A long-awaited report on sexual abuse in Germany's Munich diocese faulted retired Pope Benedict XVI's handling of four cases when he was archbishop in the 1970s and 1980s, The Chicago Tribune reported.
Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, the law firm that produced the report, said Benedict strongly denies any wrongdoing. The firm looked into abuse between 1945 and 2019 to see if church officials handled allegations correctly, and examined church files and spoke with witnesses.
The report, commissioned by the archdiocese, said there were at least 497 victims of abusemainly young males.
The current archbishopCardinal Reinhard Marx, a prominent reformist ally of Pope Franciswas faulted in two cases.
According to Yahoo! News, Marx apologized to the sexual-abuse victims. "As the current archbishop, I [apologize] on behalf of the archdiocese for the suffering inflicted on people in the area of the church in recent decades," Marx said in a statement.
Marx's predecessors include the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who served in Munich from 1977 to 1982 before becoming the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later being elected as pope.