Assaults

Fr. Klaus Mertes, S.J.

One victims' group, Eckiger Tisch (Square Table), said a sliding scale ranging between 20,000 and 120,000 euros based on the severity of the case, or a one-off payment of 54,000 euros would be more suitable. But Catholic leaders here have rejected the notion of a sliding scale, a path taken notably by the Church in Austria. The onslaught of revelations began in January when it emerged that priests at Canisius, an elite Jesuit school in Berlin, committed dozens of sexual assaults on pupils in the 1970s and 1980s. "Apologies are not enough. We need a symbolic gesture that recognises the suffering," school rector Klaus Mertes told AFP this week, when asked about the issue of compensation for victims.

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