Der Spiegel, 8 February 2010

An unprecedented scandal has hit the German Catholic Church and its “sanctimonious hypocrites”, as Der Spiegel calls them on this week’s cover. After revelations that pupils were sexually abused in the 1970s and ’80s by three of their teachers at Canisius, an upmarket Roman Catholic secondary school, "the omerta [code of silence in the Mafia] that has reigned for decades is now crumbling”, reports the German magazine. According to a Spiegel investigation of 27 German dioceses, at least 94 clerics and lay staff are suspected of having sexually abused untold number of minors since 1995 in the 24 dioceses that responded to the survey. The German Bishops Conference is to address the matter shortly. But, as the weekly observes, "the clergy are far from undertaking any real condemnation of their own conduct”. Germany, where the Church has invariably practised a policy of “transferring” the perpetrators and “playing for time”, is only “just beginning to wake up” after the ecclesiastical sex scandals in the US and Ireland.