Comparatively high? Compared to what? Not to Protestants, because Protestant churches have higher rates of abuse.
That's an unproved, if not incorrect statement. If you can believe the link usually provided by Catholics, there have been only 838 cases of “non-Catholic” abuse in total, and there haven't been any new cases of abuse in a decade. I don’t think Catholics can say the same about their own abuse statistics. No other comparable information has ever been provided by Catholics to back up the claim that Protestant churches have had a higher ratio of abuse.
[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- from the thread Kneeling Before the World"....One aspect of the John Jay report she found particularly helpful was the language it used to describe different ways bishops have responded to reports of abuse in their dioceses -- either as "innovators" or "laggards." The report describes innovators as those who "understood the harmfulness of the (abuse) acts and moved to implement policies to reduce abuse and remove abusers early on." It conversely notes that the response of other bishops "lagged behind, thus creating an image that the church generally was not responsive to victims." The report said the media "often focused on these 'laggards,' further perpetuating the image that the bishops as a group were not responding to the problem of sexual abuse of minors."
The actual report names five categories of bishops: innovators, early adopters, early majority, later majority, and laggards. Very odd that no category is given for bishops like Milwaukee's Rembert Weakland, a category that might be called something like "perpetrators".
-- My comments on the thread John Jay report not just about mistakes in 1960s, says sex abuse expert---------------------------
In an article in Sojourners, Rose Marie Berger wrote the following:
"Philip Jenkins concludes in his book Pedophiles and Priests that while 1.7 percent of Catholic clergy have been found guilty of pedophilia (specifically of boys), 10 percent of Protestant ministers have been found guilty of pedophilia."I regret to say that the statement is baloney. I never said it, and it's not true!In PEDOPHILES AND PRIESTS, I was attacking a statistic that claimed that a proportion of Catholic priests were pedophiles on the basis that the sample was worthless, since all the men involved were undergoing psychiatric treatment. Hence, you could not extrapolate that figure to the whole priestly population. In order to demonstrate the foolishness of the argument, I cited another study of protestant ministers UNDERGOING TREATMENT, which found that ten percent of them were also pedophiles. By this argument, I remarked - as a reductio ad absurdum - then ten percent of protestant clergy were also pedophiles.
(By the way, pedophilia is a psychiatric condition not a criminal offense, so nobody can be "found guilty of pedophilia")
Every time this ten percent statement appears attributed to me, I try to debunk it, but these things have a life of their own. I have no idea what the actual proportion of pedophile protestant clergy is, but I would be amazed if it was more than a fraction of one percent.
I hope that clarifies my position.
Ms Berger may well be making an excellent point - that there is no evidence that abuse rates are higher for protestant than for catholic clergy. But this particular figure is a kind of urban legend.
Philip Jenkins
Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies
Pennsylvania State University
-- from the thread Letter about Catholics wrong about Protestants [re claim 10% of Protestant clergy are sex abusers]