Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a top adviser to Pope Francis and one of the most powerful figures in the German Catholic Church, offered the pope his resignation, saying he was taking responsibility for the church’s institutional failures to prevent clerical sex abuse, his archdiocese said on Friday.
The surprise move, by one of the leaders of the German Catholic hierarchy’s response to the sex-abuse crisis, is the latest blow to a church that has lost hundreds of thousands of adherents in recent years amid revelations of abuse.
The cardinal wrote to the pope that he was asking to step down “to share the responsibility for the catastrophe of the sexual abuse by church officials over the past decades.”
The crisis over sex abuse by Catholic clergy in Germany has intensified since a 2018 report that documented thousands of cases over the previous decades.
Last week, the Vatican announced that it would be undertaking its own investigation…