A court on Tuesday ordered a German diocese to pay 300,000 euros ($323,000) in compensation to a former altar boy who was repeatedly abused by a Catholic priest in the 1970s, a ruling that a victims' association said was the first of its kind in Germany.
The state court in Cologne ruled in a case in which the plaintiff, a man now aged 62 who was raped and otherwise abused more than 300 times by a now-deceased priest, had sought 750,000 euros from the Cologne archdiocese, German news agency dpa reported. The archdiocese decided against invoking the statute of limitations in the case.
