AUSTRIA: Austrian prosecutors charged a student priest yesterday with downloading child pornography from the Internet and said he was not the only person at his Roman Catholic seminary to have done so.
Prosecutors in Sankt Poelten, west of Vienna, said they found child pornography on the seminary's main computer and on one owned by a 27-year-old seminarian from Poland, who could be jailed for up to two years if convicted.
Predominantly Catholic Austria has been shocked by its worst Church scandal in a decade. It is another blow for the Roman Catholic Church which has been shaken by a series of sexual abuse scandals across the world.
Bishop Kurt Krenn, who is responsible for the Sankt Poelten seminary, has been urged to resign.
"The material that was secured contained pornographic representations of minors of both genders, as well as so-called violent pornography," lead prosecutor Mr Walter Nemec said in a statement. "It can be ruled out that this material was implanted from outside (for example by a hacker attack)."
Mr Nemec said the material downloaded to the main computer could not be traced to an individual because all seminarians used the same password.
But he said the Polish seminarian had not viewed child porn on the central computer, which was seized last December at the start of the probe. Eight personal computers belonging to students were taken in May.
"This (main) computer was used on several days in autumn 2003 to visit Internet sites with material that was unequivocally child pornography," Mr Nemec said. The seminary contacted police late last year after a technician found child pornography on the central computer.
The scandal spread when news magazine Profil published photographs this month of clerics at the seminary fondling and kissing student priests.
Bishop Krenn has refused to resign because of the scandal.
"Nothing happened. Maybe there was a homosexual or another bad boy somewhere, somehow. Nothing else is known," Bishop Krenn said in a weekend radio interview. The director of the seminary and his assistant have already resigned.
In 1995 Profil published charges that Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, then head of Austria's Catholic Church, had sexually abused boys. The Vatican replaced him months later and he retired to a monastery.