Cologne archdiocese ordered to pay 300,000 euros in damages to former altar boy for child abuse

The court decision that was made in Cologne on Tuesday afternoon followed failed negotiations between victim Georg Menne and the German Roman Catholic Church to reach a mutual agreement. Initially, the 64-year-old German bet on a sloppy 8 tons.

After the verdict, Georg Menne seemed calm. “I’m glad I got some justice. Two other victims are also happy that I lasted so long,” Menne told the German media.

As a teenager, Menne was systematically assaulted by the same cleric for almost ten years. After the death of his father, he ended up at the age of 13 in the Catholic church community Bilderstöckchen in Cologne. There he met the 39-year-old priest Erich Jansen. The adult man held him for about 320 nights between the years 1972 and 1979 in a remote house in the Eifel region, where the child victim was abused.

“If I didn’t want to, he would say: this way you will know how much I like you,” Menne told weekly magazine The Spiegel about how he was put on the spot. No one would have known about the abuse, because it was a secret between the two people, according to Menne. For years, the young altar boy saw the priest as a father figure.

Ever since he took office in 1958, Joseph Höffner, the then archbishop of Cologne, and other officials in the church leadership knew about the allegations of child abuse against Jansen. Yet they decided only to transfer him. In this way, besides Menne, other children also fell prey to the misbehavior of the clergyman. Jansen, who has since passed away, was associated with the Catholic Church for more than fifty years until his retirement in 2004.

It is the first time in Germany that a victim of abuse within the church has taken issue in court. The ruling could therefore set an important precedent for other victims of the Catholic Church in Germany. Exactly how many people are affected is unclear. Between 1946 and 2014, 3677 altar boys were recognized as victims, according to a study from 2018. In the Menne case, both sides can still appeal against the judge’s decision.

Kerstin Claus, chairman of an independent commission investigating child sexual abuse in the German Catholic Church, is pleased with the verdict and calls it “an important signal to those affected.” It is an encouragement for other victims to continue, Claus told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

While his predecessor Höffner went unpunished, the current Archbishop Rainer Woelki is now facing a prison sentence. Since November last year, the German judiciary has been investigating whether the Cologne cardinal lied under oath about the abuse of other priests within the church.