"I may have distributed the occasional smack"
Bishop Walter Mixa (Wikipedia Commons)

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE ONCE wrote that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. While it’s unclear whether the Catholic Church’s sluggish response to the current child molestation scandal represents a reform process of any kind, there is no doubt that this badly-supervised organization is indeed entering a dangerous moment in its history. Take the case of German bishop Walter Mixa, who is himself facing child abuse charges of a different kind that may open the Church up to a tsunami of public embarrassment and costly lawsuits.

Walter Mixa, the Bishop of the Bavarian town of Augsburg and Germany’s high profile “military bishop” responsible for the pastoral care of the German armed forces, is the sort of clergyman the German press loves. Whenever there is an unpopular position to take or an inflammatory comment to make, Mixa is their man. As such he plays a critical role in the German Catholic Church, serving as the “bad cop” to “good cops” Bishop Karl Lehmann and Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of the German Bishops’ Conference.

Controversy is Mixa’s specialty. His conception of the family and women’s place within it is strictly reactionary. In the autumn of 2007 he criticized Germany’s new family policy of increasing the number of government-run daycare facilities at the expense of other family benefits, which meant that more women would be compelled (or permitted) to place their child in such centers and to return to work, as “transforming women into birthing machines.” In his 2009 Easter sermon he upset non-believers by calling a godless society “hell on earth.” Unlike some of his brethren, Mixa has made no public anti-Semitic remarks, but he doesn’t hesitate to exploit the Jews as a club to beat his opponents with. In February, 2009, for example, he used a discussion on the notorious Holocaust-denying British Bishop Richard Williamson to denounce Hitler’s Jewish policies, only to argue in the next breath that Germany’s liberal abortion laws are far worse, leading to the elimination of some nine million fetuses since the end of World War II. In 2007 he strongly criticized Israeli policy in the Palestinian areas, calling conditions there “a ghetto-like situation… close to racism.” While this is hardly an unusual opinion in Europe, Germany’s Jewish organizations did not applaud.

Back in February, Mixa famously blamed the burgeoning pedophile scandal on “the sexual revolution.” But now he finds himself entrapped in his own scandal. In late March of this year several former residents of a Catholic children’s home in the Bavarian town of Schrobenhausen stated that Mixa had brutally beaten them during his tenure as parish pastor in the 1970s and 1980s. According to one 15-year-old resident, who is now a 48-year-old mother, “He grabbed my gown, then he yanked me out of bed and beat me several times on the upper arm… It was covered all over with bruises.” A 41-year-old man remembers: “At least fifty times during this period, Herr Mixa pulled down my pants and beat me hard on my backside five to seven times with a stick.” Another resident reported: “Once [Mixa] grabbed a wooden spoon. When it broke off, he used his hand. [While he was beating me] he would say: ‘Child of God, accept this punishment,’ or ‘Satan is within you, I will drive him out.’”

Horror stories like these are becoming commonplace. Just ten days ago, an investigation at a boarding school located at the Benedictine Monastery in Ettal revealed that many hundreds of children were brutally beaten over the decades - frequently with ski poles - and in some cases were even forced by the monks to eat live salamanders.

Mixa denied the charges against him at first, claiming that “my heart is pure” and that the children would not have remembered him anyway. But on April 16, faced with affidavits and impending lawsuits, Mixa admitted that he may have distributed the odd “smack.” However, he claims, such punishments were regarded as perfectly normal in Catholic institutions at the time and “I never administered heavy corporal punishment.”

Mixa’s problems are only beginning. Not only does he face a series of lawsuits, but both the Green Party and a number of religious and political organizations are demanding his resignation as Bishop of Augsburg and military bishop. And since Mixa’s “smacks” were indeed “normal” at the time, but are regarded as assault and battery today, both the clergy and the Church as a whole are bracing themselves for a very rough summer.

Will Mixa resign and will the Church introduce sweeping reforms? Both prospects seem unlikely, but ultimately it may not matter. According to the news magazine Focus, Germans are abandoning the Catholic Church at an unprecedented rate. One in four is seriously contemplating signing out for good. In the Bavarian diocese of Würzburg alone, 1,233 members formally left the organization in March of this year, compared with just 407 in the same period two years earlier. As a registry official in Munich told the magazine, “On some days we have up to one hundred people leaving the church, while thirty had been the average before [the pedophile scandal].”

Be sure to shut the lights off on your way out, Herr Mixa.