When the MHG Study was released in September 2018, the German Bishops' Conference publicly apologized and promised reform. Two Permanent Council decisions over the following two years are the documentary record of what that promise became.
The first, adopted 18 November 2019 and in force from the start of 2020, revised the church's own order for handling sexual abuse allegations and its framework regulation on prevention. Drawing directly on the MHG Study's own findings, it broadened who the church treats as needing protection: beyond children and youth, the revised framework named care-dependent adults as a group its prevention measures must also reach.
The second decision addressed money rather than process, and it is the more measurable of the two. Since 2011, the church had operated a procedure for recognition payments to victims that had processed roughly 2,400 applications at an average payment of about 5,000 euros. On 24 November 2020 the bishops replaced it entirely: a new Independent Commission for Recognition Payments, its seven members drawn from law, medicine and psychology and explicitly not employees of the church, began work on 1 January 2021 with the power to award payments of up to 50,000 euros per case, and more in particular hardship. The ceiling rose tenfold, and the decision moved from the church's own hands to an independent body.
Read against the MHG Study's own finding, that personnel files identified at least 1,670 clergy implicated in the abuse of at least 3,677 minors, the payment reform answers a narrower question than the study asked: not how much abuse occurred, but how the institution that commissioned the count would respond to it financially and procedurally once the count existed.