German Bishop Walter Mixa, the most senior Catholic official to become a target of physical-abuse claims in Germany's widening church scandal, acknowledged that he occasionally slapped children more than 30 years ago as a parish priest but denied a string of allegations that he routinely flogged students at a Catholic orphanage. Bishop Mixa, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to head the German diocese of Augsburg in 2005, has faced a barrage of public accusations in recent weeks from a half-dozen former residents of a Catholic children's home in the Bavarian town of Schrobenhausen.
The controversy marks a broadening in what began in recent months with scores of sexual-abuse allegations against church officials in Germany but has quickly grown to include hundreds of stories of beatings and other forms of sheer physical abuse of children.
These newly unearthed accounts are forcing some of Germany's most elite boarding schools and other Catholic institutions to examine how past traditions of disciplining children with corporal punishment crossed over, in some cases, into more violent abuse.
Bishop Mixa's accusers have submitted sworn affidavits to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, alleging that when he was a parish priest in the 1970s, he often punished them with slaps, punches to the arms and beatings with, among other things, a carpet beater.
Some have repeated the claims on German television.
They haven't accused the bishop of sexual abuse.
The physical-abuse claims have pitted the word of the former residents of Schrobenhausen's St. Josef's home against that of the bishop, who has repeatedly called the accusations untrue.
In an interview posted online by Germany's Bild newspaper on Friday, though, the bishop conceded that he "could not rule out this or that slap 20 or so years ago."
Though he reiterated that he "at no point ever used physical violence against children or adolescents," he pointed out that it was common practice in past decades to discipline students by boxing their ears.
"That was completely normal and every teacher and student of that generation knows that as well," he said in the interview.
The Augsburg diocese has also dismissed the allegations as untrue, citing a preliminary report presented Friday by a lawyer who the church had appointed to examine abuse claims at St. Josef's.
The lawyer said in the report that after interviewing a handful of people so far, he couldn't establish any "culture of beating" at the school decades ago.
The controversy has put the bishop at odds with St. Josef's. St. Josef's director Herbert Reim and the chairman of the foundation that backs the school, local priest Josef Beyrer, wrote a letter last week to former students saying the school intended to take the allegations seriously.
"Unfortunately we have no influence over how Bishop Mixa addresses the allegations," they wrote.
Bishop Mixa is no stranger to controversy. In February, he drew a flood of criticism after saying the "so-called sexual revolution" was partly to blame for the clerical sexual abuse scandal in Germany and elsewhere.
He was criticized last year after he attacked a move by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to provide more preschool care for working mothers, calling it an effort to turn women into "birth machines."
While Bishop Mixa is the first high-level German church official to be accused of past physical abuse, other clergy have acknowledged regularly hitting children in past decades.
Georg Ratzinger, the pope's brother and a monsignor, said last month that, as the director of the famed Regensburg Domspatzen choir for 30 years, he slapped children occasionally, though later stopped.
Msgr. Ratzinger said he never was aware of reports of sexual abuse but that some boys opened up to him about being physically mistreated at Etterzhausen, one of the choir's Bavarian feeder schools. He said he failed to follow up, however, not realizing the severity of the situation.
The church has since appointed an investigator to look into allegations of decades of routine brutal beatings there. Similar probes have been launched elsewhere, including at the Ettal Benedictine-run boarding school near Munich, and have broadened beyond the Catholic Church.
Last month, the board of the secular Odenwald School south of Frankfurt resigned after dozens of revelations of abuse surfaced there.
Former students at the Ettal school continue to come forward, said Thomas Pfister, a lawyer appointed to look into allegations there, even after he presented his final report earlier this week, concluding that hundreds of children were brutally beaten or tormented by more than a dozen monks and other staff, mostly before the 1990s.
The result, Mr. Pfister said, was "a regime of violence" in which some children even were admitted to the hospital on occasion for injuries and that can't be explained as part of a tradition of corporal punishment as discipline.
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