As if the news pouring out of the Vatican wasn't already bad enough. At least 547 boys at a German Catholic choir school are now claiming to have suffered sexual or physical abuse.
The victims are claiming that this crime against them is like being in 'prison, hell or a concentration camp', said an investigator releasing a final report Tuesday.
The Regensburger Domspatzen, or Cathedral Sparrows in English, is a 1,000 year old Cathedral Choir located in Bavaria.
As early as in 2010, this has dragged into the massive sexual abuse scandal which continues to remain plaguing the Catholic Churchm
Many of the victims remembered their time in the choir school as 'the worst time of their lives, marked by fear, violence and helplessness', said lawyer Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the diocese to look into the cases.
In the final report on abuses between 1945 and the early 1990s, Weber said he had uncovered 67 cases of sexual abuse and at least 500 cases of other physical violence, with some former singers having fallen victim to both.
This more than doubled the total of 231 reported abuse cases he had uncovered through the interviews by January 2016, when he said victims had spoken of rape, sexual assaults, severe beatings and food deprivation.
The attorney, Weber, pointed to a 'culture of silence' and placed part of the new blame for the situation on the school's former choir master Georg Ratzinger, who is the elder brother of former Pope Benedict.
Being the head of the choir from 1964 to 1994, Georg Ratzinger was often 'blamed for looking the other way and failing to intervene', said Weber.
Georg Ratzinger, 93, has denied any knowledge or wrongdoing and said that such allegations of sexual abuse was 'never discussed' while he ran the choir.
Weber said the attacks had been concentrated into one primary section of the boarding school which resides in the town of Regensburg.
Weber said that 49 alleged perpetrators had been identified, but that they were not expected to face any criminal charges as the alleged crimes took place too long ago.
The victims are now expected to receive 20,000 euros or $23,000, each in compensation for the sexual crimes perpetuated against them.
The German scandal is one of several recently to have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years, notably in both Ireland where one Priest admitted sexually abusing more than 100 children.
Several German institutions have also been engulfed by the scandal, including an elite Jesuit school in Berlin which had acknowledged a systematic sexual abuse being inflicted upon it's pupils by two priests in the 1970s and 1980s.
Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4707046/At-547-boys-abused-German-Catholic-choir-school.html
