Official finding Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · 2017

Germany: Essen diocese's legal review of personnel files names 62 accused priests, deacons and staff

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Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

Catholic priests, one deacon, religious-order priests and lay employees of the Diocese of Essen

Organization

Diocese of Essen, Institut für Praxisforschung und Projektberatung (IPP), Munich

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

Victims were parishioners and dependents under the pastoral and diaconal authority of clergy the diocese itself supervised and, in a documented instance, reassigned to further ministry despite known risk.

Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2017-11-01 · official-finding

Independent legal review commissioned by the Diocese of Essen, Germany. A commissioned legal investigation of all personnel files of the Diocese of Essen, published November 2017, documented 62 accused or convicted diocesan priests, one deacon, six religious-order priests and four lay employees. A follow-on sociological study by the Munich IPP institute, running since March 2020, further examined the diocese's institutional handling. Reporting also documented at least one case where a priest was returned to parish ministry despite a prior conviction and an expert report warning against work with children.

Documented coercion mechanisms

clerical and diaconal office within diocesan parishes

Cited record

Sources

official inquiry report commissioned review IPP München: Sozialwissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung sexuellen Missbrauchs im Bistum Essen.: The commissioned sociological study of institutional handling of abuse in the Diocese of Essen.
institutional primary review summary Bistum Essen: Sozialwissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung sexuellen Missbrauchs im Bistum Essen.: Diocese's own summary of the 2017 legal review and IPP study.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.bistum-essen.de/fileadmin/relaunch/Bilder/Soziales_und_Hilfe/Sexueller_Missbrauch/ipp/230213_IPP_Studie_Bistum_Essen_final.pdf Corpus classification: official-inquiry-report; evidentiary role: commissioned-review. SHA-256 299205a5bf21237b5f81dd290714b16c507b3b964524d1ae6747d82950aa568f
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://www.bistum-essen.de/hilfe-bei-sexualisierter-gewalt/sozialwissenschaftliche-aufarbeitung-sexuellen-missbrauchs-im-bistum-essen Corpus classification: institutional-primary; evidentiary role: review-summary. SHA-256 4d76c6ab64bd1fe9e483dbc89fd46b2327734e5b5cef83615d1d0e75d4fecace
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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