The Local
January 24, 2011
http://www.thelocal.de/society/20110124-32615.html
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Victims of sex abuse at Jesuit schools are finally being offered concrete compensation payouts one year after the abuse scandal was revealed, a Catholic official said Monday.
Klaus Mertes, rector of Canisius College, the elite Jesuit school in Berlin at which the first allegations surfaced, told daily Berliner Zeitung's Monday edition that the 205 known victims would share about €1 million in damages payments, meaning each will receive roughly €5,000.
The figure was immediately rejected as insufficient by a victims' group.
The onslaught of revelations of sex abuse within the Catholic Church began in January 2010 when it emerged that priests at Canisius committed dozens of sexual assaults on pupils in the 1970s and 1980s.
Mertes told the paper that the church would "finalise the precise sums and carry out he payment of probably about €1 million in total."
Matthias Katsch of the group Eckiger Tisch, which represents victims, said the sum was disappointing and in no way adequate.
Mertes himself revealed the scandal a year ago. After writing to former students of the college to alert them to the fact that former teachers were being investigated for abuse, he then held a press conference to announce the discovery.
Sexual abuse allegations at other Catholic schools began to surface and quickly turned into a flood of claims.
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