The Roman Catholic Church in Germany has terminated an independent inquiry it commissioned into sexual abuse by clergy, citing a breakdown in trust.

It said that bishops' trust in Prof Christian Pfeiffer, head of the Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute, had been "destroyed".

Prof Pfeiffer accused the Church of obstructing his team's work by seeking to control the investigation.

The Church said a new inquiry would be commissioned with a different partner.

Bishops approached the institute in 2011 after a wave of revelations about sexual abuse broke and tens of thousands of Catholics deserted the Church.

Hundreds of people had come forward to say they were abused as minors between the 1950s and 1980s, amid suspicion the crimes were concealed.

Pope Benedict XVI, the German-born head of the Catholic Church, met victims when he visited Germany in 2011, and abuse survivors have been offered financial compensation.

About 34% of Germans are officially Roman Catholic, according to recent figures

An independent inquiry into sex abuse in the German Catholic Church was supposed to restore faith in the embattled institution. But now the Church has called it off, citing a breakdown in trust with the researchers. The country’s justice minister has demanded that an inquiry continue, though.

It was a major promise after a major disaster: In summer 2011, the Catholic Church in Germany pledged full transparency. One year earlier, an abuse scandal had shaken the country’s faithful, as an increasing number of cases surfaced in which priests had sexually abused children and then hidden behind a wall of silence.

The Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute (KFN) was given the job of investigating the cases in 2011. The personnel files from churches in all 27 dioceses were to be examined for cases of abuse in an attempt to win back some of the Church’s depleted credibility.

But now the Church has called off the study, citing a breakdown in trust. “The relationship of mutual trust between the bishops and the head of the institute has been destroyed,” said the Bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, on Wednesday morning.

The director of the KFN, Christian Pfeiffer, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the Church had refused to cooperate. At the end of last year, he contacted the dioceses twice in writing. He reminded them of their promised transparency and cooperation. He also asked them whether there was any indication that in some dioceses files had been actively destroyed