***But thankfully, most Presbyterian ministers are married. A celibate priesthood is just asking for problems.***
Then why is abuse among Protestant denominations approximately twice that amongst the Catholics?
***And Hebrews is NOT only discussing animal sacrifices. The writer clearly speaks of CHRIST’S one-time, accomplished sacrifice for His sheep.
No vain repetition required of the one and only sacrifice that takes away sin which we are to remember, not re-enact as if it was not final.***
Not vain. It is required. Jesus specifically wants us to recreate His Last Supper and Passion. I understand that you do not think of Augustine as particularly blessed, but understand, that he participated and approved the Sacrifice of the Mass, as did the Church right from the beginning.
ROTFLOL!!!
The Los Angeles Archdiocese paid out over $600 million IN ONE DAY to settle sexual abuse claims against priests. That's ONE CITY in ONE DAY!!!
Keep putting money in those coffers, Mark. Half of everything you give goes to pay for the sins of "another Christ."
Not one cent of my Sunday offering goes to pay off anything but the building and mission funds and new Bibles for the pews.
If your own lying eyes don't tell you the truth, then believe the true statistics that say sexual abuse among Catholic priests is at least four times higher that in Protestant churches.
Thankfully this doesn't really effect me. I certainly don't plan on ever handing my kids over to a parochial school led by "celibate" men and women.
And I question the common sense of any parent who does these days.
Twice that? Are we talking raw numbers, or percentages?
The John Jay Study (see threads here, here, and outside coverage here) - commissioned by the U.S. Catholic Bishops' National Review Board itself - found that the number of Catholic priest abusers equalled four percent of the entire Catholic priest population. The John Jay study's findings are more than conclusive - they're exhaustive of the entire US population of Catholic priests. Now by comparison, every study I've been shown of "Protestant" abuse included volunteers and laypersons, something the John Jay Study did not cover among Catholic parishes; if we exclude them from the "Protestant" studies (to create a "pastor vs priest" apple-to-apple comparison), we arrive at a roughly 1% abuse rate for all "Protestant" pastors, or (in other words) at least a four times greater likelihood that any given Catholic priest will be a sexual predator as compared to any given "Protestant" pastor. And that's according to the numbers and studies that Catholics keep telling me about.
In short, any raw numbers (i.e. "x number of claims filed per year") are meaningless. What's more telling is the percentage of the abusers out of the whole, and in that regard, the Catholic Church is far sicker than the "Protestant" Church. In that regard, the John Jay Study is positively damning.
Let me throw in one caveat to those comparisons. I found something interesting when I broke down the "Protestant" abuse cases by denomination / affiliation / theological leanings. The more free will / Arminian / synergistic the theology is, and the more independent the association is (as opposed to denominational affiliation), the higher the abuse statistic goes - and conversely, if you just look at the Reformed Protestant denominations, the number of "Protestant" abuse cases statistically drops off the chart by comparison. It's only the average of all "Protestant" pastors that is around 1%. Some independent churches have statistics that are far, far higher than the Catholic average of 4%. But we're not the ones who consider them "Protestant" - it's Catholics that insist on applying that label to them.