BERLIN—The Catholic Church in Germany acknowledged a “depressing and shameful” legacy of sexual abuse on Sept. 12 after a leaked study said clerics had abused thousands of children over a 70-year period.
The document, commissioned by the German Bishops’ Conference, revealed that 1,670 clerics and priests had sexually abused 3,677 minors, mostly males, in the country between 1946 and 2014, Der Spiegel said.
