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How much the Catholic Church would have to pay the victims

The suffering inflicted on people in church structures who were looking for security and community is bitter to the point of crying out in horror.

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How much the Catholic Church would have to pay the victims

The suffering inflicted on people in church structures who were looking for security and community is bitter to the point of crying out in horror. The Catholic Church has responded, and that response includes performances in recognition of suffering. Many voices now criticize the amount as too low - usually only up to 50,000 euros is not a sum that can even come close to compensating for the inflicted pain and injuries.

These voices are undoubtedly right: it is always too little. What has happened cannot be undone, it can only be met with genuine remorse and a willingness to make amends. Church payments contribute to this.

Anyone who criticizes their height knows that any height of any kind would ultimately be too little. It's about payments in respect of immaterial damage, and those are things that cannot be weighed up in money. Pain cannot be expressed in euros - just as little as happiness and contentment.

The lawyer is well aware of this, and so it is judicial practice that compensation for pain and suffering is determined in a comparative pendulum view to what is paid in other cases for comparable damage. This differs greatly according to the different legal systems - in the USA, compensation for pain and suffering is much higher, but in Austria it tends to be lower than here.

Nobody can then say that their sum is correct, because all these sums are ultimately determined arbitrarily. One only looks at the consistency of the system with regard to lighter, heavier and similar cases - but the absolute level remains without a rational explanation.

If you now look at the compensation for pain and suffering that German courts have awarded in the case of sexual abuse, you will find that the sums that the churches award are regularly within this range. If you trust the legal databases, sums of more than 50,000 euros have only been awarded once. Terrible cases also sometimes resulted in much lower compensation: A standard comment on this matter summarizes critically that “even for the most brutal rapes, amounts between 10,000 and 50,000 euros were usually only awarded” and only 100,000 euros in one single exceptional case.

Even today, in extreme cases - such as a case in the district court of Oldenburg, in which the court itself commented on the act as an "unimaginable horror scenario", or a case in the district court in Münster, which spoke of "living through these nightmarish treatments" - only 20,000 and 25,000 respectively awarded euros. In the case of the 76-fold sexual abuse of a six-year-old schoolgirl, which the Münster District Court also decided, it was only 8,000 euros.

These sums are too small, but this criticism does not affect the churches, but our legal system as a whole.

But what is more important is that the church itself does not pay because it has abused itself, but one of its representatives. The churches pay even though the claim for damages is already time-barred or cannot be collected. They are not based on compensation for pain and suffering, the debtor of which is initially the person who acted, but on the Victim Compensation Act. This is provided just in case the one who harms does not make amends for his harm.

The Victim Compensation Act, in which the state is liable as a kind of reserve debtor, now also provides for the mere plausibility check of the abuse - proof, as in the case of damages, which is sued in court, is not required. The church did that too. So the regulation is coherent, it is well thought out and it reflects the values ​​of our legal system.

Any payment will continue to be just a building block with which the church can try to build a new foundation of trust. Consistent processing, unequivocal admission of mistakes and the will to do things differently in the future are required. Many hopeful signs can be seen by anyone who doesn't close their eyes.

We must continue on this path if the church does not want to obscure what it actually stands for: making the love of Christ perceptible in this world.

Gregor Thüsing is Director of the Institute for Labor Law and Social Security Law at the University of Bonn.

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