German Cardinal, Reinhard Marx, has offered Pope Francis his resignation, saying the Catholic Church is dead at its centre following claims of a catastrophe of sexual abuse by the church officials.
The 67-year-old Marx, who is one of the church’s most influential liberal figures, offered to resign as Archbishop of Munich.
He served as the head of the Catholic Church in Germany, president of the country’s conference of bishops, until last year when he declined to stand for a second term.
“In essence, for me it is a matter of sharing responsibility for the catastrophe of sexual abuse by church officials over the past decades,’’ Marx wrote to the Pope.
The offer, which has yet to be accepted by the pontiff, came amidst growing outcry from the German folk over years of abuse.
Recall that Pope Francis sent senior foreign bishops to investigate the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany’s largest, last week over its handling of abuse cases.
Marx said the investigations and expert reports over the past 10 years consistently showed that there had been a lot of personal failure and administrative errors, but also institutional or systemic failure.
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