kreuz.net

» see kreuz.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

kreuz.net sat behind two locked doors. The language was German and the subject was internal Roman Catholic church politics, and unless you had both keys there was no path to this site from anywhere else on the web. I was in Ankara at the time, reading Turkish forums about graphics cards. This grave is entirely reconstructed from German reporting.

The domain was registered on 14 May 2002 and the site went into operation in October 2004. It presented itself as a traditionalist Catholic news portal, publishing several pieces a day plus a daily roundup, with reader comments that the editors pruned when the readers disagreed. Its own description of itself was an initiative of an international private group of Catholics in Europe and overseas who worked full time in church service, and who considered protecting the anonymity of informants a point of honor.

The anonymity was real and it held. The imprint pointed at an entity called Sodalicium for Religion and Information at an address in El Segundo, California. The last whois record put it in Panama City. Until a search in August 2013 nobody outside the operation was publicly known to be part of it.

Alongside the church news it published antisemitic and homophobic material, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine described its vocabulary as borrowed from Der Stürmer. Germany's youth media authority indexed it and the domestic intelligence services of both Germany and Austria kept it under observation. The Central Council of Jews in Germany classified it as a hate site. Every German-speaking bishops' conference publicly distanced itself from it, as did Vatican Radio, which had linked to it and had used it as a source between March 2005 and November 2008.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it published ~

The reason it mattered inside the church rather than just outside it was access. In December 2009 the Catholic news agency Kathpress reported that kreuz.net had circulated a forged Vatican document promoting a conservative liturgical reform. In 2011 an internal German Bishops' Conference paper on handling cases of sexual abuse appeared on the site within hours of being written, and the person who leaked it was never identified.

Spiegel Online reported that at least two dozen contributors had church backgrounds, including priests and at least one religion teacher. Most articles carried no byline at all. Some were published under the names of dead people.

~ the october that ended it ~

The German comedian and actor Dirk Bach died suddenly on 1 October 2012. He was 51 and he was gay. On 2 October kreuz.net published a piece about his death that was vicious enough to move the story out of church media and onto the national news.

What followed was a campaign rather than a prosecution. The publisher Bruno Gmünder put up 15,000 euros for legally usable information identifying the people behind the site. Hundreds of tips arrived. Leaked email traffic with the editorial address was passed to the campaign anonymously, and in November 2012 three more contributors were named and confirmed their involvement. On 14 November a priest named Hendrick Jolie admitted he had written for it after initially denying it, and on 28 November he stepped down as a spokesman for the German network of Catholic priests.

~ the empty chair ~

On Sunday 2 December 2012 the site stopped answering. The taz reported it the next morning and could not say who had done it, treating a hack and a voluntary disappearance as equally plausible. The Internet Archive's last successful capture of kreuz.net is dated 1 December 2012 and there is nothing after it.

It was the operators. Everything that might have identified an author was deleted before the site went dark. Austrian police seized the machine in August 2013, by which point the Berlin prosecutor's office had been investigating incitement for a year, and its conclusion was that no suspect could be identified. Eight years of anonymous publishing ended with an empty server and a case nobody could file.

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