Payment offered to German Abuse Victims - but Rejected By Victims

The German Jesuits have offered a financial payment to the victims of sexual abuse at their schools, but victims have rejected the offer as too low.

German Jesuits offer payment to sex-abuse victims

Berlin - Germany's Jesuit order of Catholic priests is offering to pay 1 million euros (1.36 million dollars) in compensation to some 200 victims of sex abuse.

The offer, equivalent to 5,000 euros per person, was made public on Wednesday. It concerns mostly men who turned to investigators to report suffering a variety of abuses, including semi-naked caning by teachers, at the country's four Jesuit schools.

The scandal erupted last year, when a Jesuit secondary school in Berlin, Canisius College, wrote to former pupils seeking evidence of sex abuse.

Germany's Catholic bishops have yet to settle a separate compensation package for people who were abused in parish churches, diocesan schools and other institutions. The Jesuits are a semi- independent institution within the Catholic Church.

Thomas Busch, a Jesuit spokesman in Munich, refused to call the planned payments 'compensation,' saying the suffering of the abused could never be put right with money.

-Monsters and Critics

Sex abuse victims reject Church payout offer

Victims of sexual abuse at Jesuit schools in Germany said Thursday that the Catholic Church’s offer of €5,000 in compensation is too low.

“This sum is not at all sufficient to compensate for the damages suffered or to signal a recognition of guilt,” leader of the Eckiger Tisch victim’s group Thomas Weiner told daily Frankfurter Rundshau. 

Weiner also said he found it incomprehensible that victims already known to the Church would have to file an application to receive the payment.  

-The Local.de

• Catholic abuse victims offered firm payout (24 Jan 11)
• European court rules preventive detention of sex offenders unjust (13 Jan 11)
• Pastor sacked for sex in Hamburg church (7 Jan 11)

Monastery sex abuse cases in Switzerland claim 40 victims from 15 monks

Fifteen monks were found guilty of sexual abuse at a monastery in Einsiedeln, in central Switzerland, in cases stretching back over six decades, an investigative panel said on Thursday.

The panel said there were at least 40 victims, with the majority of the cases occurring in the 1960s and 1970s.

The cases only began to come to light when preventive measures were introduced in 1998.

Nine of the monks found guilty committed indecent acts on children, the panel said.

Three monks were found to be ring leaders and the notion of sexual abuse at the monastery had become accepted, the investigators said.

For the first time last year, the Catholic Church in Switzerland compiled detailed statistics of cases of sexual abuse committed by priests and other pastoral workers.