translated from Spanish: Horror in Germany: report credited 3.677 cases of sexual abuse committed by priests

an internal investigation, made on behalf of the Conference Episco PAL German, documented a total of 3.677 cases of sexual abuse committed by Catholic religious 1,670 since 1946 until 2014.
According to the online edition of the weekly Der Spiegel, which refers to the documentation gathered by experts from the universities of Mannheim, Heidelberg and Giessen, such situations are a “massive problem” in the bosom of the Catholic Church and persist in the today.
Approximately half of the victims of those abuses were under 13 years of age and in one in six cases it was “some form of rape”, as he cites the publication.
For two-thirds of the victims, the perpetrators of abuses were their confessors or priests that kept some kind of religious link.
The report was commissioned by the Episcopal Conference, and according to the plans of the institution, its conclusions will be presented by Cardinal Reinhard Marx September 25.
Experts from universities have examined around 38,000 records and material from the 27 German dioceses.
Material records “confidential” mostly it’s material and internal records that had not come to light until now and that, according to “Spiegel”, were “strictly confidential”.
Report part of the base of which, together with the documented cases, there is a “dark figure” of many other situations of abuse that may not be investigated, because records were destroyed or due to lack of evidence.
Bishops commissioned this study to the universities as a result of the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the German Catholic Church in 2010, prompting a crisis of credibility for the German Catholicism.
In March 2011 the Catholic Church offered to pay 5,000 euros compensation to each of the victims of sexual abuse, with a possibility of increasing that amount to the most serious cases.
Around one thousand of victims of sexual abuse by representatives of the Catholic Church they then formalized his request for compensation for abuses suffered.
The Catholic Church is the main confession along with the Gospel in Germany, with about 24 million believers each.

Original source in Spanish