More than 600 children (610 exactly) have been victims of sexual abuse committed by religious in the diocese of Münster and this, for seventy-five years, according to an independent report presented on Monday.
The number of priests implicated amounts to 183, according to this report written by five experts from the University of Münster (western Germany), who studied cases of pedocrime between 1945 and 2020. In total, this 196 ecclesiastics have been identified, more than 4% of the ecclesiastics of this bishopric, and 90% of them have never been prosecuted.
In the 1960s and 1970s, two pedophile acts were committed per week on average in this diocese, according to this report which succeeds several other edifying studies on the extent of pedocrime in the German Catholic Church since the end of the Second World War world.
Officials “kept silent”
Referring to a "frightening record", one of the authors, Klaus Grosse Kracht, denounced the efforts to systematically conceal these sexual abuses.
Officials "covered up the matter, remained silent and only intervened superficially when it came to avoiding public outrage", he said.
For Natalie Powroznik, another author of the report, the real number of victims should be eight to ten times higher.
"About 5,000 to 6,000 girls and boys" have been sexually abused, she said.
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