Pope accepts resignation of German Bishop Mixa

May 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

VATICAN CITY

A leading German bishop who has acknowledged slapping children and is being investigated on charges of sexual abuse of minors and financial misconduct lost his job Saturday as Pope Benedict XVI continued cleaning house.

The German-born pontiff formally accepted the resignation offer made April 21 by Bishop Walter Mixa, an outspoken conservative voice in the German church and a military chaplain for Germany, as well as head of the Augsburg diocese.

Mixa’s posting to Augsburg in summer 2005 was among the first appointments Benedict made at the start of his papacy.

The terse Vatican announcement, without commenting on the abuse allegations, only said the decision was in line with canon-law provisions for bishops no longer fit for service.

Mixa had offered to step down amid persistent allegations that he hit children while a priest decades ago and of financial irregularities at a children’s home he was responsible for.

Pressure on the Vatican to get him out of the post increased Friday, when the Augsburg diocese said, without further details, that it had given prosecutors information in line with German church guidelines for handling sex-abuse cases.

Mixa, 69, is the latest in a line of churchmen to be toppled by scandals.

The Vatican is reeling from allegations that bishops and other church hierarchy systematically covered up physical or sexual abuse of minors in several European countries. In some cases, such as that of Mixa, bishops have themselves been accused of abuse.

In a reference to the sex-abuse revelations staining dioceses in several European countries this year, Benedict said Saturday that the church was being “tried” and “wounded” by sin.

In Germany, We Are The Church, a lobby for church reform, voiced “relief” that Benedict accepted Mixa’s resignation.

Mixa’s resignation, along with those recently of other compromised bishops in Ireland, Norway and Belgium, raise both “increasingly pressing questions” on how bishops are chosen and calls for local church involvement in the vetting process behind the Vatican’s selection of bishops, We Are The Church said.

In the Mixa case, German daily Augsburger Allgemeine reported that Ingolstadt prosecutors had launched a preliminary investigation of allegations that he sexually abused a boy during his time as bishop of Eichstaett from 1996 to 2005.