The term of Schönborn’s predecessor, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, OSB, had been wracked by charges of sexual misconduct with young men decades before, when Groër was responsible for a Benedictine school. Those charges had further divided a badly split Austrian hierarchy and further debilitated the Church’s life in Austria. In February 1998, Schönborn and three other Austrian bishops publicly announced that they had come to the “moral certainty” that the charges against Groër were true. Schönborn publicly apologized “for everything by which my predecessor, and other Church dignitaries, have wronged people entrusted to them.” The archdiocese of Vienna, he pledged, was “prepared to offer help to all those who thus have suffered injury,” including financial support for therapy. 71
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