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.
Wrong again.
From fox news: (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,286153,00.html)
The mainstream media has all but ignored the recent Associated Press report that the three major insurance companies for Protestant Churches in America say they typically receive 260 reports each year of minors being sexually abused by Protestant clergy, staff, or other church-related relationships.
In light of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church beginning five years ago, religious and victims’ rights organizations have been seeking this type of data for years. It has been hard to come by since Protestant Churches are more de-centralized than the Catholic Church.
Responding to heavy media scrutiny, the Catholic Church has reported that since 1950, 13,000 “credible accusations” have been brought against Catholic clerics (about 228 per year.) The fact that this number includes all credible accusations, not just those that have involved insurance companies, and still is less than the number of cases in Protestant churches reported by just three insurance companies, should be making front page of The New York Times and the network evening news. It’s not.
As with sola Scriptura, how you come down on the efficacy of the sacraments affects your polity and ecclesiology. If you believe the sacraments to be a means of grace, especially in the ex opere operato sense, then that generally commits you to a firm lay/clerical division and apostolic succession to help ensure the valid administration of the sacraments.And that, in turn, weighs in the relative gravity of schism. If you believe that the sacraments are a means of grace, and the Church the appointed custodian and gatekeeper, then a break with the true church is a worst-case scenario. Unity is put at a premium.
If, on the other hand, you deny these assumptions, then there are worse things than schism. In that event you travel light and keep your bags packed (Acts 7; Heb 11).
Although the scandal of schism is often treated as the scarlet letter of the Protestant movement, less is said about the opposing scandal of catholicity. For if you identify the true Church with one visible communion, then no matter how corrupt the institutional Church becomes, you are committed to that system. It is like the old Roman punishment in which a murderer was chained to the rotting corpse of his victim.
The Catholic sex scandal is a case in point. The problem was not only with sodomites in the priesthood and vile prelates who facilitated their crimes. The problem is that the good Catholic is just as complicit as the worst, for the good Catholic is more loyal to the lofty pretensions of his church than a cynical Magisterium, and his institutional allegiance to a rotten institution is just what enables a corrupt clergy and vicious hierarchy to stay in business. For the good Catholic, his church is the only church in town, and so his duty to defend Mother Church takes precedence over institutional reform inasmuch as the institution, if deemed to be divine, is beyond reform.
The problem with pretensions to a divine teaching office is that it leaves you exposed to the same mistakes as any other uninspired organization, but you're even worse off; on the one hand, you disdain conventional standards of investigation and verification; on the other hand, you don't dare admit error for fear of losing face. This has a cumulative effect as special pleading advances a new lie to cover up an old blunder. Otherwise innocent errors or petty mistakes, which are harmless enough if caught and corrected early in the process, instead supply the premise for further falsehoods in a downward spiral of systematic deceit. The Roman Church has a long history of this, viz., the False Decretals, the Galileo affair, the Sixtine Vulgate
Quix, would you mind weighing in on this? If I'm not mistaken I believe you have some training in sociology.
Deeper pockets, Dr. E.
Philip Jenkins (an ex Catholic), in Pedophiles and Priests writes that: Notwithstanding the difficulties that such data comparisons hold, the available information on clergy sexual misconduct shows that the problem is bigger among Protestant clergy. For example, the most cited survey of sexual problems among the Protestant clergy shows that 10 percent have been involved in sexual misconduct and “about two or three percent” are “pedophiles.” With regard to the “pedophile” problem, the figure for the Catholic clergy, drawn from the most authoritative studies, ranges between .2 percent to 1.7 percent. Yet we hear precious little about these comparative statistics. *
Deeper pockets. Abuse and inappropriate sexual contact is much higher in Protestant denominations that freely allow married clergy than in the Catholic Church.
Which denomination do you give your Sunday offering to? There may be more than meets the eye there, as well.