A worrisome report traces decades of widespread child sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany at the hands of greedy nuns supported by perverted priests. The story came to light because of a lawsuit that alleged that the Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer was selling or loaning orphaned boys from their boarding houses for weeks at a time in a disgusting rape trade to predatory priests and business people.
According to the men involved in the lawsuit, as boys, they were not put for adoption or sent to foster care because selling them to sick rape trade filled the sisters’ coffers with their “convent of horrors.” The report claims that 175 people majority of whom were boys from the ages of 8 to 14, were abused for more than two decades. Still, it failed to blame the nuns directly, instead of says it was “systematic” management errors and “leniency” enabling the abuse to continue. The report also finds that some boys were even groomed to be sex slaves to perverts.
The lawsuit also surveyed religious orders and found that 1,412 people who lived in or frequented convents, parishes, and monasteries as children, teenagers, and ward were also abused by at least 654 monks and nuns and other members of the orders s. Around 80 per cent of the victims were male, and 20 per cent female. The survey also found that 80 per cent of the abusers are now dead, and 37 had left the priesthood or religious order.
For several years, the alleged abuse went on. One of the males claimed that even after leaving the convent, the nuns frequently visited their college dorms to drug him and deliver him to the predators’ apartments. Even after multiple requests, there was no comment from Order of Sisters of the Divine Redeemer about the allegations.
The lawsuit was first reported by Deutsche Welle last year. 63-year-old victim Karl Haucke leads it along with 15 other former orphans demanding that the Archdiocese of Cologne conducts a full investigation. This investigation finally concludes in January 2021, but the details of that investigative report were horrifying that Archbishop Reiner Maria Woelki denied public access to the report. Any journalists who wish to see the report need to sign confidentiality agreements and not publish its contents. In January, eight German journalists walked out of a press conference after denying access to the church’s investigation report unless they agree not to publish its contents.
According to Haucke, he was abused at least once a week by usually more than one priest between 11 and 14. He calls the refusal of the report’s release in January “scandalous” and added that denying the journalists the right to publish the story felt “like being abused all over again.”
Due to the prevailing lawsuit, several lawyers received access to the 560-page report have shared parts of it with news outlets. Various German businessmen and complicit clergy were named in the report as they “rented” the young boys from nuns in a convent in Speyer, Germany between the 1960s and 1970s. The young boys faced worst abuse where they were forced into participating in gang bangs and orgies then after returning to the convent the nuns would punish them for wrinkling their clothes or for getting covered in semen all over.
The archdiocese now led by bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesmann said that the investigation report was “so gory” that it would be too shocking to make it public. Wiesemann told the Catholic News Agency KNA that he had to take a month’s sabbatical to recover after reading it. The report’s primary abusers are now dead. Many of the victims have settled for financial compensation from the church, so they did not join the lawsuit. In March, the archdiocese is planning to publish a new revised, undoubtedly heavily redacted edition of the report.
