Germany's Catholic Church admits to sexual abuse that continued for 70 years

The head of the Catholic Church in Germany apologized to thousands of victims who were sexually abused as children by clerics over a 70-year period.

"For too long in the Church we have looked away, denied, covered up and didn't want it to be true," Cardinal Reinhard Marx, chairman of the German Bishops' Conference said on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, German magazine Der Spiegel quoted a leaked copy of a study that revealed that 1,670 clerics and priests had sexually abused 3,677 minors, mostly boys, in the country between 1946 and 2014.