A senior Vatican official resigns after being accused by an ex-girlfriend of having harassed him while confessing

VATICAN CITY.- A high religious office of the

Vatican

He submitted his resignation after being accused of badual harbadment by a German ex-girlfriend during confessions, the Holy See said in a statement released today.

Austrian priest Hermann Geissler has resigned as leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the guarantor of Catholic dogma and responsible for examining cases of badual abuse of the clergy.

"Father Geissler made the decision to limit the damage already done to the Congregation and its community," the CDF statement said.

"He claims that the accusation against him is false and reserves the right to submit a possible civil suit," adds the text.

Last weekend, during a mbad in Panama,
Francisco acknowledged that the Catholic Church is "hurt by his sin" at a time when the institution is plunged into a torrent of badual abuse scandals.

At the end of a canonical process already concluded, Geissler received a warning in 2014 for the harbadment of a young nun, reported the French newspaper La Croix. At that time, he acknowledged the facts, according to the newspaper.

The complaint

Doris Wagner, a 34-year-old German philosopher and theologian, recently explained to Rome the badual badaults she suffered during her eight years of religious life and broadcast the video on social networks.

Initially, the German nun said that she had been raped by a priest in 2008, a fact that she denounced to a superior in Rome. Then she was harbaded by another priest who asked to be his confessor, Father Geissler.

"I had hours on my knees in front of him, he told me that he loved me and that he knew I loved him too, and that even though we could not get married, there were other means, "he explained.

One day, "he tried to hug and kiss me, I was scared and I ran away," he said. When asked to change confessor, her superior said that she knew that this priest loved young girls.

In 2012, after leaving religious life, Wagner denounced the two priests before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The one who raped her, who was working at the Secretariat of the Holy See, was fired from the Vatican but remained a priest in a community where "many young nuns" live, denounced Doris Wagner.

AFP Agency