Germany extends statute of limitations on abuse, US Jesuits agree $166 million

US Jesuits agree $166 million abuse payout  by Laura Onstot Mar 25 2011

SEATTLE (AFP) – A US Jesuit order has agreed to pay $166 million to compensate some 500 mostly native American child victims of “horrific” sexual abuse at religious mission schools, lawyers said.

The US Northwest chapter of the Rome-based Society of Jesus agreed to the payout — which lawyers said is the biggest by a religious organization in the United States — as part of bankruptcy proceedings.

Most of those abused by members of the Oregon Province — the Jesuit order covering the states of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana — were at mission schools on Indian reservations, from the 1940s through to the 1990s.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110326/ts_alt_afp/usreligioncatholicabuse_20110326025049

Germany extends statute of limitations on abuse
Mar 23, 2011
BERLIN – Germans who were sexually abused as children will now have up to 30 years after their 21st birthday to bring their alleged attackers before the courts.
The change was triggered by last year’s sex abuse scandal that rocked the nation’s Roman Catholic Church.
The previous statute of limitations on civil abuse cases was only three years. Criminal cases have a statute of limitations ranging from three to 30 years, depending on the charges.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110323/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_church_abuse_1

Sex abuse victims reject Church payout offer, MPD movie

Sex abuse victims reject Church payout offer 27 Jan 11

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.

On Monday Klaus Mertes, rector of Canisius College, the elite Jesuit school in Berlin at which the first allegations surfaced, told daily Berliner Zeitungthat the 205 known victims would share about €1 million in damages payments from the Jesuit order, meaning each would receive roughly €5,000….

The onslaught of sexual and physical abuse revelations within the Catholic Church began in January 2010 when it emerged that priests at Canisius committed dozens of assaults on pupils in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then more than 200 cases of such abuse at Church institutions throughout the country have emerged.
http://www.thelocal.de/society/20110127-32695.html

When the Devil Knocks  January 26, 2011 CBC News Network

Until her mid-40s, Hilary Stanton lived with big gaps in her memory that she thought were normal. Then Hilary had a breakdown, started therapy, and gradually discovered that – during those gaps in memory that she thought were so normal – other personalities (“alters”) were taking over from her….Many of the therapy sessions were videotaped to train therapists in the treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). Remarkably, Hilary has given Bountiful Films permission to use these videotaped therapy sessions in a documentary – When the Devil Knocks.  (website has online film)
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/passionateeyeshowcase/2011/whenthedevilknocks/

Germany mass child abuse, Knights of Columbus accused of child abuse, porn ring

Germany admits enslaving and abusing a generation of children
Lawsuits accuse Knights of Columbus of child abuse
Federal authorities say they broke up a global child porn ring

Germany admits enslaving and abusing a generation of children
Government agrees up to €120m in compensation for three decades of post-war ‘Nazi-era’ brutality in foster homes  By Tony Paterson in Berlin  Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Germany has owned up to one of the most disturbing examples of mass child and youth abuse in its post-war history, some 60 years after the first teenagers started being locked away and mistreated by supposedly “caring” foster homes.

The country agreed yesterday to provide a €120m (£101m) compensation fund for the estimated 30,000 victims who were among the 800,000 children in German foster homes in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.

Institutions that for decades meted out inhuman treatment – including ritual beatings, periods of solitary confinement, forced labour and sexual assaults – were not youth remand centres or borstals as might be expected, but homes run by nuns and priests in former West Germany’s Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as state-run homes.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-admits-enslaving-and-abusing-a-generation-of-children-2159589.html

Lawsuits accuse Knights of Columbus of child abuse NEW HAVEN, Connecticut Dec 14, 2010 (Reuters) – The Knights of Columbus was sued on Tuesday by two men who said they were sexually abused as children by a leader of a youth group run by the Roman Catholic fraternal organization. The federal lawsuits allege that Knights of Columbus officials knew a leader of the Columbian Squires youth group in Texas was molesting children but did not make any effort to stop him or remove him from the position.

The suits are believed to be the first child sex abuse claims filed against the Catholic group, said Jeffrey Herman, the attorney representing the two alleged victims….
“We emphatically deny the allegations that have been made,” said Patrick Korten, a spokesman for the Knights of Columbus.
With 1.8 million members worldwide, the Knight of Columbus is the world’s largest Catholic mens’ organization and is focused on charity work….

In one of the lawsuits, an unnamed Kansas resident claims the Squires leader abused him from 1978, when he was 10 years old, until 1986.
He claims the leader shared him with other youth counselors in the group and threatened to kill him if he told anyone, the lawsuit said.
The second lawsuit came from Texas resident Jim Dennany, who said he alerted Knights of Columbus officials in 1986 to assaults he said he suffered in the 1970s when he was a young teenager.

He claimed the group took no action, concealed the allegations and told him to keep quiet, according to the lawsuit….
The Knights of Columbus spokesman said the group first became aware of allegations of sexual abuse against Rivera in December 2009.
“We acted immediately, removing him from any responsibility involving youth programs,” Korten said. The group also alerted local authorities in Brownsville, Texas…
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BD5LW20101214

Federal authorities say they broke up a global child porn ring By Michael Martinez, CNN December 15, 2010 Los Angeles (CNN) — Federal authorities announced Tuesday they dismantled an international child pornography ring that allowed its 35 male members to trade thousands of images and videos of boys in sexually explicit situations through a website.

The announcement was made in the wake of Monday’s guilty plea by a Georgia man to transporting child pornography using a secret Internet bulletin board called “Lost Boy.” That website operated from September 2007 to January 2009, when authorities shut it down and began investigating the men who operated it, officials said….

The investigation has also led to the identification of 27 victims of child abuse in the United States, including some whose images were posted on the Lost Boy bulletin board, officials said….

The bulletin board also had a “Handbook Project,” where members contributed to a guide on how to find and groom boys to engage in sex and how to move on to other victims when the current victim grows too old to be attractive to the members, authorities said.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/12/14/california.child.porn/index.html

Bishop admits ignoring abuse cases, The Pope’s Duty

Bishop admits ignoring abuse cases 09 Jul 2010 Germany’s senior Roman Catholic bishop Robert Zollitsch has admitted his mistakes in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse against an alleged pedophile priest. The Archbishop of Freiburg and head of the German Bishops Conference said on Friday that he should have probed more intensely the sexual abuse accusations laid against a priest, who is believed to have molested boys when he worked in the town of Oberharmersbach from 1968 to 1991, AP reported. “I was shocked about the unfathomable extent of the abuse in Oberharmersbach, which has become apparent only in recent months,” said Zollitsch, who was diocese staff manager at the time and responsible for priest placements. According to a statement issued by the diocese, Zollitsch also met with victims and their families, delivering apologies to those whose lives have been shattered by sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church over the past months. The statement has pointed to accusations against 44 other priests in the first six months of 2010.  http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=134100&sectionid=351020604

Editorial: The Pope’s Duty  7/8/10
When rolling scandal forced the American Catholic bishops conference to take action against pedophile priests, the prelates issued a tough policy requiring accused child molesters be reported immediately to secular authorities. This mandate finally acknowledged that crimes against children should take priority over bureaucratic church policies that served to cloak rogue priests and bishops in a fog of ecclesiastical evasion.
Eight years after the American church’s overdue order, it is shocking that Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican have not yet applied it to the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. The pedophilia scandal has erupted in other nations, leaving parents concerned about a repetition of the harrowing experience in America, where more than 700 priests had to be dismissed across a three-year period. Yet the Vatican is reportedly working on new “guidelines” — not mandates. They are likely to fall short of zero-tolerance and other requirements in the American church that parishes and communities be alerted to abusers.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/opinion/09fri3.html

Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal, Archbishop apologises

Church Office Failed to Act on Abuse Scandal  By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
July 1, 2010 In its long struggle to grapple with sexual abuse, the Vatican  often cites as a major turning point the decision in 2001 to give the office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the authority to cut through a morass of bureaucracy and handle abuse cases directly. The decision, in an apostolic letter from Pope John Paul II, earned Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, a reputation as the Vatican insider who most clearly recognized the threat the spreading sexual abuse scandals posed to the Roman Catholic Church. But church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that 2001 decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.

The Vatican took action only after bishops from English-speaking nations became so concerned about resistance from top church officials that the Vatican convened a secret meeting to hear their complaints — an extraordinary example of prelates from across the globe collectively pressing their superiors for reform, and one that had not previously been revealed. And the policy that resulted from that meeting, in contrast to the way it has been described by the Vatican, was not a sharp break with past practices.

It was mainly a belated reaffirmation of longstanding church procedures that at least one bishop attending the meeting argued had been ignored for too long, according to church documents and interviews. The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.                                   http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/world/europe/02pope.html

Archbishop apologises to sex abuse victims Jul 3, 2010 Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop has apologised to church sex abuse victims for what he describes as an unacceptable evil. In a letter to parishioners, Archbishop Denis Hart said continuing reports of abuse, including the latest investigations in Europe, are causing great distress and shame for the Church. He offered a sincere and unreserved apology for what he describes as a grave evil.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/03/2943947.htm

The Sexual Revolution and Children – How the Left Took Things Too Far 07/02/2010
By Jan Fleischhauer and Wiebke Hollersen Germany’s left has its own tales of abuse. One of the goals of the German 1968 movement was the sexual liberation of children. For some, this meant overcoming all sexual inhibitions, creating a climate in which even pedophilia was considered progressive….One of the few leaders of the left who staunchly opposed the pedophile movement early on was social scientist Günter Amendt. “There is no equitable sexuality between children and adults,” Amendt said, expressing his outrage over the movement. Alice Schwarzer, the founder of the political women’s magazine Emma, also spoke out against the downplaying of sex with children and defined it as what it really was: outright abuse.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,702679,00.html

The Trial of Benedict XVI, Germany: 205 claims of abuse at Jesuit schools

Shanley recovered memory case
http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/shanley-recovered-memory-case/

The Trial of Benedict XVI By Jeff Israely and Howard Chua-Eoan Thursday, May. 27, 2010
How do you atone for something terrible, like the Inquisition?….When his turn came, Ratzinger, the church’s premier theologian, intoned a short prayer that said “that even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.”….

“He grabbed me, tickling and wrestling like I did with my dad, and I thought at first it was fun,” McDaid, who grew up in Salem, Mass., says of a parish priest. “But then something changed … He started grabbing my genitals. I felt him rubbing against me from behind … I was so scared. I knew this was so wrong. I looked out the window. I started praying.” That would happen again and again over three years. McDaid’s devout mother was delighted whenever the priest arrived to pick up her son, just 11 when the abuse started, to join other boys on trips to the beach. But, recalls McDaid, now 54, “the last boy out of the car was the one who would get molested.” He finally spoke to his dad, who then took him to a priest from the next town to report what had happened. “We waited for months. Then there was a rotation of priests. He left, but they made it look like a natural progression. They celebrated him with cake and ice cream.” The boy was left in silence and with his secret shame. The priest, Father Joseph Birmingham, went on to abuse boys in three other parishes in the Boston area before he died in 1989. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1992171,00.html

Germany: 205 claims of abuse at Jesuit schools
AP Thu May 27, 2010 MUNICH – A special investigator says in her final report that at least 205 former students claim to have been sexually or otherwise abused in Jesuit schools in Germany. Investigator Ursula Raue said Thursday she thinks the number is even higher, as “we cannot expect to have heard everything yet.” She said 46 Jesuits and non-clerical staff at the schools have been accused of abuse or of knowing of such crimes without acting.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100527/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_church_abuse

also at
http://www.wral.com/news/national_world/world/story/7677958/

Number of Jesuit abuse victims, ritual abuse newsletter and conference

The latest ritual abuse newsletter is now available online at http://ritualabuse.us/2010/04/issue-92-may-2010/

This issue contains information on clergy abuse around the world, including alleged cover ups by the Vatican and Pope, Boy Scouts, Franklin Scandal/Gosch, Ritual abuse, mind control, mk-ultra, CIA experiments, West Memphis 3, Afghanistan, MPD/DID. Child sexual abuse and its traumatic effects, Scientology and a similar Milgram experiment on French TV.

New Information on this summer’s ritual abuse conference with updated speaker information and reduced early registration fees is at : http://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/

Number of Jesuit abuse victims continues to climb 10 Apr 10 Some 10 weeks after the first abuse cases at Jesuit education institutions came to light, the number of victims continues to climb. Around 170 people are now believed to have been abused in Germany.  Lawyer Ursula Raue, who has been commissioned to investigate the abuse cases, told the DPA news agency in an interview that abuse by members of the clergy took place in Jesuit educational establishments as early as the 1950s. She did not name the exact number of known abusers. Berlin’s prestigious Canisius secondary school made headlines when it was revealed at the end of January that at least two priests had repeatedly abused students in the 1970s and 1980s. It is now thought that at least 59 former students were victims of the abuse. http://www.thelocal.de/society/20100410-26465.html

Vatican denies abuse liability, Pope implicated, bishop accused beating orphans

Law firm implicates Vatican, Pope in abuse case By CHRISTINE ARMARIO AP  March 31, 2010 MIAMI – A South Florida law firm is implicating the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI in its handling of a priest accused of sexually abusing children. Jessica Arbour, an attorney representing one of the alleged victims, says documents show the Vatican was aware of Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio’s misconduct as early as 1968. Thirteen years later, Benedict became head of the Vatican office that received a petition from Garcia-Rubio seeking to leave the priesthood. Arbour says the paperwork was lost. Arbour says they do not have any evidence indicating children were abused during that time. A lawsuit has been filed against the Archdiocese of Miami, claiming it was negligent in its supervision and assignment of the reverend. Arbour says it may be amended to include the Vatican.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/31/AR2010033100931.html

Vatican offers 3 reasons it’s not liable for abuse   By NICOLE WINFIELD, AP  Mar 30, 2010 VATICAN CITY – Dragged deeper than ever into the clerical sex abuse scandal, the Vatican is launching a legal defense that it hopes will shield the pope from a lawsuit in Kentucky seeking to have him answer attorneys’ questions under oath. Court documents obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren’t employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the “smoking gun” that provides proof of a cover-up.

The Holy See is trying to fend off the first U.S. case to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself for negligence for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children.

The case was filed in 2004 in Kentucky by three men who claim they were abused by priests and claim negligence by the Vatican. Their attorney, William McMurry, is seeking class-action status for the case, saying there are thousands of victims across the country.

“This case is the only case that has been ever been filed against the Vatican which has as its sole objective to hold the Vatican accountable for all the priest sex abuse ever committed in this country,” he said in a phone interview. “There is no other defendant. There’s no bishop, no priest.” The Vatican is seeking to dismiss the suit before Benedict XVI can be questioned or documents subpoenaed. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100331/ap_on_re_eu/eu_the_vatican_s_defense_16

describes abuse

German bishop accused of beating orphaned girls April 1, 2010 One of the Pope’s closest conservative allies in Germany, Bishop Walter Mixa, has been accused of brutally beating and flogging children in his care. The Bishop of Augsburg, 68, denies the claims by five former pupils at a Catholic-run orphanage and care facility. But they will be a source of deep embarrassment and concern in the Vatican: Bishop Mixa is part of a conservative axis in Pope Benedict XVI’s native Bavaria that has always backed the pontiff in his most controversial decisions, from criticising the violence of Islam in Regensburg cathedral, to rehabilitating the Holocaust-sceptic Bishop Richard Williamson….The beatings were regular and always brutal.

“At least 50 times Mr Mixa pulled down my trousers and beat me on the bottom with a stick, five or six whacks each time,” Mr Tagwerk added….The blows were always administered in places where the bruising could be hidden – high up on the arm or on the bottom. One of the victims, a man who is now 44, reports being flogged with a carpet beater, 35 strokes each time. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7082705.ece

20 priests accused of sex abuse (Germany), U.S. lawyer takes on Vatican

20 priests accused of sex abuse – diocese    March 29 2010
Berlin – A German Roman Catholic diocese said on Monday that 20 of its current and former priests had been accused “in recent weeks” of sexual abuse as a scandal embroiling the Church widened….
Ackermann said the diocese was still conferring on how to handle three cases that fell under the criminal statute of limitations.
He said that beyond the new cases that had surfaced, three priests had been convicted of abuse in the 1990s….The Vatican has said it received 3,000 reports between 2001 and 2010 of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy committed over the past 50 years.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=nw20100329182045293C418447&set_id=1&click_id=24&sf=

U.S. lawyer takes on Vatican over abuse cases
He shared documents with New York Times, sees Ore. lawsuit as critical
by Patrick Condon AP  March. 28, 2010 ST. PAUL, Minn. – Jeff Anderson has filed thousands of lawsuits alleging sex abuse by priests and won tens of millions of dollars for his clients, but he has had a bigger goal in mind for nearly two decades. He wants to bring his career-long legal crusade against misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church right to the top. He would love to question Pope Benedict XVI himself under oath. Though that is extremely unlikely given that the pope is a head of state, documents Anderson has unearthed have the potential to take a scandal that has plagued dozens of dioceses around the world and place it at the doorstep of Vatican leadership.
The documents, which became publicly known in the past week after Anderson shared them with The New York Times, show that a Vatican office led by the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, halted a church trial against a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 boys at a school for the deaf. “This is a tipping point,” Anderson said. He found the documents in handling one of the dozens of lawsuits he has pending against various church officials, and hopes to use them to bolster a separate federal lawsuit against the Vatican itself….

Oregon case could be key
In that case, an unidentified plaintiff claims he was sexually abused as a teenager in 1965 or 1966 by the Rev. Andrew Ronan at St. Albert’s Church in Portland, Ore. According to court documents, Ronan was accused of abusing boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in the Archdiocese of Armagh, Ireland. He was transferred to Chicago, where he admitted abusing three boys at St. Philip’s High School, and after that was sent to Oregon. The church removed Ronan from the priesthood in 1966. He died in 1982. The lawsuit says the Vatican had to approve the international transfer. The Holy See claims it is protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which prohibits U.S. lawsuits against foreign countries. Several lower courts have produced differing rulings on the suit, and the Holy See has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the question. The high court has not decided whether it will hear the case. Anderson said his legal team will attempt to use documents from the Milwaukee lawsuit to show the Vatican was heavily involved in decisions about how to deal with problem priests.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36075025/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

Vatican confirms report of sexual abuse and rape of nuns by priests in 23 countries By Frances Kennedy in Rome 21 March 2001
The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.
Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the Aids virus.
Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly magazine in the US, have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vatican-confirms-report-of-sexual-abuse-and-rape-of-nuns-by-priests-in-23-countries-688261.html

Irish bishop resigns, Germany to set up expert panel on sexual abuse

Shanley recovered memory case

Irish bishop resigns, apologizes to abuse victims By SHAWN POGATCHNIK (AP) – 3/24/10
DUBLIN — Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation Wednesday of Bishop John Magee, a former papal aide who stands accused of endangering children by failing to follow the Irish church’s own rules on reporting suspected pedophile priests to police. Magee apologized to victims of any pedophile priests who were kept in parish posts since he took charge of the southwest Irish diocese of Cloyne in 1987….Irish society is still debating the merits of Saturday’s unprecedented letter from Benedict apologizing for decades of unchecked child abuse by priests, nuns and other clerics. The letter criticized Irish bishops, promised a Vatican inspection of unspecified dioceses and religious orders in Ireland — but accepted no Vatican responsibility for promoting a culture of cover-up.

Benedict also has yet to accept resignation offers from three other Irish bishops who were linked to cover-ups of child-abuse cases in the Dublin Archdiocese, the subject of a government-ordered investigation that published its findings four months ago. Magee, however, had been expected to resign ever since an Irish church-commissioned investigation into the mishandling of child-abuse reports in Cloyne ruled two years ago that Magee and his senior diocesan aides failed to tell police quickly about two 1990s cases.

The church and government suppressed publication of that report’s findings until December 2008, when Magee faced immediate calls to quit from victims’ rights activists and some parishioners. They accused him of ignoring an Irish church policy enacted in 1996 requiring all abuse cases to be reported to police….Cardinal Sean Brady, a Vatican-trained canon lawyer, faces his own cover-up accusations. He has admitted collecting evidence in 1975 from two altar-boy victims of a notorious pedophile priest — but had both boys sign confidentiality agreements and never passed his information to police. That priest, Brendan Smyth, wasn’t imprisoned until 1994 after molesting scores of children in Ireland and the United States….The church’s Cloyne report found that Magee and his diocesan deputies fielded complaints from parishioners about two priests from 1995 onward — but told the police nothing until 2003 and little thereafter. The report said Cloyne church authorities appeared solely concerned with helping the two priests, not protecting children of the diocese.

One priest, who was accused of molesting a younger priest when he was a teenager, was encouraged by Magee to resign. But the investigation found that the bishop shielded the abuser’s identity from police — and considered such concealment “the normal practice” for the church.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jQWrzPjAEtxgfa_tARqu5413A4PAD9EL25QG2

Germany to set up expert panel on sexual abuse 24 Mar 2010 Following recent revelations of sexual abuse in Catholic Church, Germany is setting an expert panel to discuss sex crimes in the country….Merkel has said that the panel should examine past abuse cases and reevaluate Germany’s limitations on sex crimes as well as possible compensation for the victims. Since January, several Catholic-run institutions in Germany have been engulfed in a deepening scandal over allegations of sadistic and sexual abuse, with more than 150 pupils coming forward with horrifying tales of mistreatment, mostly during 1970s to 80s. German Catholic Church is dealing with 300 alleged cases of child abuse across the country, many of which were reported in regions where Pope Benedict served as an archbishop. Vatican is accused of building up a “wall of silence” around such issues after it ordered Catholic priests in 2001 to report ‘priestly misbehaviors’, even the most serious abuse cases, only to the Vatican. http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=121572