Father Mertes, since you made public the long-standing sexual abuse at the Canisius College in Berlin in 2010, endless reports have been made about it, and your own life can certainly be divided into a before and an after.

What was your biggest disappointment in these twelve years?

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

There were two.

First, that I was not trusted by those in charge of the church.

I became a nag.

The expression also came from bishops, including those who ended up having dirt to hide themselves, as I realized years later.

Would you like to name names?

D rather not.

But there were few positive exceptions.

We were lepers and that feeling stays with me to this day.

Surviving the church's disloyalty to its own people, doesn't that eventually make you fearless?

Yes, that's the big win.

You lose your fear. The second disappointment is media falsifications, such as I had to hear from a moderator on a TV talk show: I just about “pulled my head out of the noose” by publishing the reports of the victims.

I gave an affidavit and obtained the only cease and desist letter of my life.

But the claim has been out there ever since and continues to be peddled.

In your 2013 book “Lost Confidence” you thought about the terms “knowledge” and “knowing”.

Even outsiders, you write, are not always able to recognize symptoms as symptoms, despite a faint suspicion or a certain uneasiness.

In this sense, you also referred to yourself, the clergyman before 2010, as “confident”.

Does everyone really understand the in-between realms of perceptual ability that they penetrate – and that this is how the actual understanding begins?

Sexualized violence against wards is always an abuse of power.

And there is no processing of abuse in institutions - church, school, family - without the clarification of accomplices.

The unwillingness to admit such knowledge prevents the enlightenment.

And the lack of knowledge about this shared knowledge has structural causes.

"That's not how you talk about a priest!" - with such formulations colleagues have rejected attempts by children to speak.

There is something wrong in our church long before it comes to sexual abuse.

And only the victims can tell us about it.

In January 2010 you must have been clear: If I write this letter and send it to 600 former students of the Canisius College, all hell will break loose.

What was going through your mind then?

First of all shock about the sheer dimension of the sexual abuse.

If what the three former students of the 1970s told me at the time was true, a single perpetrator must have had up to a hundred victims.

The perpetrators had therefore proceeded systematically with the aim of abusing.

The three former students, who were themselves victims, wanted to come to the 30th anniversary of their Abitur in autumn 2010 and make sure that the two perpetrators were not invited and that the reason for this was given.