Posted on 06/03/2011 9:31:28 PM PDT by dangus
Mesquite Baptist Academy unaware pastor was serial rapist: http://www.ydr.com/premium/ci_18161823
Temecula assistant pastor raped choirgirl, but most Protestants have no way to track sexual predators: http://stopbaptistpredators.org/documents/Nolawonchurchworkerchecks.pdf
Trinity Baptist man convicted after church forces rape victim to publicly confess to extramarital sex: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/05/28/2011-05-28_new_hampshire_man_ernest_willis_guilty_of_raping_teen_church_member_tina_anderso.html
Merrywood Baptist youth minister charged with molestation: http://www.insidestatesboro.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=271%3Amerrywood-youth-pastor-charged-with-milestation&catid=53%3Astate-news&Itemid=138
Christopher Settlemoir, 27, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church, MI, sentenced to prison for homosexual assault: http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/news/local/former-baptist-pastor-chris-settlemoir-sentenced-to-prison-20110524-mr
Oklahoma Baptist minister arrested on sex complaints: http://www.fox23.com/mostpopular/story/pastor-sex-charges-arrested-Oklahoma-crime-teen/pQvLKDdu6EWq_IIQQ9hkPg.cspx
Long before the press got wind of the Catholic sex scandals, Pope John Paul II helped reduce the rate of sex abuse in the Catholic Church by over 95%. Over 98% of the sex-abuse cases in the Catholic Church happened before 1990. Yet non-hierarchical Protestant churches are still seeing hundreds of sex abuse cases each year. Most of these aren't lawsuits over ambiguous decades-old cases, but arrests due to recent horrific crime.
Such churches don't want to investigate sexual offenses for the same reasons certain industries have avoided product safety tests: they want to be able to continue to profess ignorance. So rather than know whether or not their pastor is a rapist, they ask him to resign in exchange for them not telling anyone else why they asked him to resign. Then they quietly sit back as he gets another job in another parish.
Purposeful ignorance of a suspected evil may protect them from lawsuits, but it perpetuates evil. The leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention who refuse to facilitate a national database, and the congregations' leaders who stay silent rather than investigate offenses, are every bit as responsible as the bishops who reassigned sex offenders... but at least the bishops had typically been counseled by psychological experts that the sex offenders wouldn't repeat their crimes. Now that they know better, why won't the Baptist conventions change their policies? Why are the Baptists still where the Catholic Church was thirty years ago?
>> 1 - One of your fellow Catholic apologists on this forum published statistics from the largest company handling insurance for churches in the US. It showed claim filed against Catholic congregations to be almost equal to the number filed against Protestant ones in the US...but there are 10 times as many Protestant congregations. <<
And the Catholic Church counts as abuse priests’ own confessions, lawsuits, arrests, indiscretions, etc. dating back sixty years. The Protestant tally includes only arrests this year. It’s the arrest RATES which are the same.
Catholic priests arrested last year: 30.
Protestant ministers arrested last year: 240.
>> 2 - The John Jay report, which shows the problem in the Catholic Church to have peaked 30 years ago, was based on self reporting. Oddly enough, the Catholic parishes did a great job of reporting pedophile priests WHO WERE ALREADY DEAD. To say the problem no longer exists because current Catholics say they dont have a problem anymore - when compared to insurance claims - is false. It ignores the faulty design of the study. <<
Yes, it’s based on self-reporting... after $1 billion was spent by lawyers trying to find anything that would stick. The non-hierarchical structure of the Baptist churches drives the money out of the lawsuits; the denomination denies responsibility, and culpability. So there’s no money ferreting out the abuse among the Baptists. That difference skews the abuse charges TOWARDS the Catholic church, not away from them. 90% of the Catholic abuse cases are lawsuits, where criminal charges would never stick. The only charges against Baptists we hear of are the criminal charges.
>> 3 - The large majority of Protestant abuse claims involve male-female. It is still wrong, but what shocked many about the Catholic problem was that it was homosexual in nature - around 80%, IIRC. We have known there were heterosexuals in Protestant denominations, but were shocked at the level of homosexuality in the Catholic Church. <<
This is true, and it’s one of the reasons I started investigating sexual abuse among the Protestants. Because frankly, I don’t see the bishops doing that much better of a job at keeping the gays out, so I’m curious how the Catholic Church fixed the issue in the 1980s, and why it’s largely a gay thing. My guess is actually that heterosexuals with disordered heterosexuality don’t last long in the priesthood.
>> Um...no. There is no one in the SBC convention with any authority above the local congregation. YOU have as much authority over a local baptist congregation as the President of the SBC does. You have the same right - and legal risk - if you start your own database. And remember, if you dont have the evidence to support your charge in court, you probably will be sued for slander. There is a national database maintained by the government, and the SBC recommends all pastor search committees use it. <<
That’s right. Every church in the SBC is free to adopt whatever standards and protections the SBC puts forth; if they don’t like it, they can just decline whatever stamp of approval the SBC offers. All sorts of business-related groups do this: the BBB, the IGA, the Independent Restauranteers Association.
If they create the database, all any church board needs to ask is something like “Say, Rev. Howley, why didn’t your parish participate in the SBC database? Were you worried about getting fired for raping children or something?” And suddenly, pastors around the nation would get the message real fast that they’d better participate. So Dick Land and the rest of the SBC prevented pastors from being exposed to such questions by blocking the creation of the database.
And yes, I absolutely note that sex abuse has been a problem since the beginning of the Church. It was what most of the priests executed during the Spanish Inquisition (which excluded all Jews and Muslims from its purview, by the way) were killed for. It’s probably what drive Martin Luther crazy. And here’s why bishops who put pastors back into pastors after getting the green light from psychologists have no excuse: The Nicene Council had to deal with the issue, and required that priests who gave scandal be defrocked!
If you read the Catholic articles, you’d see me frequently making such a case: the sexual scandals HAVE indeed faded, but the heresy and disobedience which precipitated them is alive and well.
Really!! Each parish is typically comprised of 750 to 1000 families. Each parish typically has a minimum of five Sunday masses (counting the Saturday evening sabbath) whereas Protestant churches rarely have more than one. The same wikipedia you cite as authoritarian also says;
"The Catholic Church has the third highest total number of individual parishes in the US, behind Southern Baptists and United Methodists. However, because the average Catholic parish is significantly larger than the average church from those denominations, there are more than four times as many Catholics as Southern Baptists and more than eight times as many as United Methodists."
>> Really? 5000 Catholics are in your local church each Sunday? I cant say Ive ever seen anything anywhere close to that kind of attendance in southern AZ... <<
Well, he certainly is counting the 60% of Catholics who do not attend mass, but he is also counting the 60% of Protestants who do not attend services.
There are 60,000,000 Catholics in 40,000 parishes, about 1,500 per parish. Probably about 600 attend each week, per parish. But many have thousands in attendance per week; if Catholic churches were counted among megachurches, you couldn’t find a Protestant church scrolling through the pages of Catholic churches.
That’s partly why most Catholic churches offer 5-7 services per weekend. My local parish offers mass at 5:30 PM Saturday, 7:30 AM, 9 AM, 10:30 AM, noon and 6:00 PM Sunday, with a 1:30 PM Spanish mass. The 9:00, 10:30 and 6:00 masses have hundreds of people standing, each. And it’s only the third largest congregation in town. On the other hand, Boston was filled with huge, empty churches.
In my two weeks’ worth of work, I found NINE stories about Baptist ministers being arrested, versus only one of Catholic minister being arrested. That’s about what I found the previous three times I’ve done this. So that’s a big problem for the Baptists.
The strange thing is that this problem seems to disproportionately affect Baptists and other non-hierarchical churches. The UMC, TEC, ELCA, UCC, etc., seem to have seen what happened to the Catholic Church, recognized their potential liabilities, and put a stop to anything untoward happening. You’ll notice only 1 Lutheran minister among the scandals I posted. Anglicans seem to have been getting into a lot of problems in other countries this go round, but not here.
I’m warning Baptists to get their act in order, because of all Protestant denominations, I like the SBC the BEST. They are right now where the Catholics were in about 1990 in awareness. But they think they’re fiscally untouchable. Look out.
They were concealed, moved around ... that's the controversy. No one who is a Christian believes any man since the fall, outside Jesus Christ himself, could be sinless. There will be moral failings, both sexual and otherwise, as well as criminal acts among fallen men. Sheltering and protecting them, treating them better in fact than their victims, is the source of the ongoing outrage. Turning them over to civil authorities for arrest, trial and imprisonment is not.
Understand that, and see things in a different light.
... Actually, I want to be PERFECTLY honest. The first time I did this, I was trying to Calvinists that they had their fair share of problems. However, at only 2 million members, the largest officially Calvinist denomination was puny compared to the Catholics (67 million) or Southern Baptists (17 million). And it was a liberal church which long ago left Christianity behind. The PCA and OPC are too tiny (400,000 total) to even notice statistically, and frequently not distinguished from the much larger PCUSA in news stories.
So I looked at Baptists as a proxy for Calvinists, since a lot of Baptist churches lean Calvinistic, and many Calvinists tend towards Congregationalism, like Baptists. I was a little hesitant to do so, because I like the SBC way more than the PCA.
I was horrified to find that Baptists seem to be unique among Protestant denominations in the sheer number of sexual predators among their clergy. With all the pervert Episcopalians I’ve known of, and all the horndog Pentacostalists I’ve met in person, I completely expected I’d come across far more news stories about them. (Maybe the Episcopalians no longer consider it abuse when a sixteen year old boy and his priest “explore their sexuality together?”)
Well your motivation in your post seemed to be a anti Protestant theme.
I would think Catholics need to be honest (and probably most are) about the slowness of their leadership to act on the terrible abuse that has gone on.
You need to focus more on cleaning up your problem, rather than starting a pissing match over who has the most perverts abusing kids.
Story after story about offenders being moved around, etc after they committed terrible crimes. They should have been shot.
Has that changed? I don't know; hopefully so. I highly doubt any Catholic members in the pews would have any patience or sympathy for this stuff.
The hierarchy of the Church seems to be at fault, in my opinion. Not the members.
In my Protestant denomination; we just don't have the have (for lack of a better word) respect; for our leadership. If we felt they were slow to act, we would feel empowered physically drag them from their offices.
Any priest or pastor, Catholic or Protestant; should be executed if the sexually abuse kids.
I would think everyone here would agree with that.
It has nothing to do with "defending the faith", unless you can point to something in scripture or official doctrine that mandates or even condones molestation. This is ALL about individual immoral clergy, and the failure of hierarchies to adequately police the situation.
It affects the Catholic Church, Protestant churches, the Boy Scouts, school teaching, etc, etc. ANY organization that has people with authority interacting with young people is vulnerable to predators in their ranks.
>> I’m not quite sure you’re perceiving the rebukes and criticisms profferred in any way close to the intent of them. Pointing out Baptist ministers arrested for misdeeds, sexual or otherwise, only serves to underline that up until fairly recent years, priests with similar sexual misdeeds were not arrested, the matter was treated as an internal church matter and civil authority was avoided. <<
I appreciate your attempt at fairness, but it’s based on the very misunderstandings I’m trying to correct.
Read the news stories. In almost none of the cases were the Baptist congregations helpful. Usually, the response of the congregations were to rally around their pastor, or to dismiss him in secret. One made the rape victim confess in front of the congregation of HER “sin” in getting raped. One story was of a minister who was CONVICTED of rapes in three states, and kept getting new jobs.
Conversely, in the few NEW cases that have come forward, the Catholic Church officials go straight to the police, as they are now required to (and should have done all along). I’m arguing that Baptists need to adopt such methods.
>> They were concealed, moved around ... that’s the controversy. <<
In many cases, a church board dismisses a pastor after hearing rumbles of sexual “indiscretions” without referring the matter to the police. The pastor agrees to the dismissal on the condition that nobody discusses the rumors. In other words, he is in essence saying, “allow me to move on to find new victims, and I won’t contest my firing;”
And my point is that I don’t believe this is substantially different than shuffling priests around. (Which, incidentally, only happened in a small minority of dioceses.) In fact, in most cases when the priests WERE shuffled around, the diocese referred the priest to psychiatric evaluation, and was told that he was now “safe.” Were it not for uniquely Catholic doctrine which points out the error, I could argue that the bishops acted out of innocent naivete and trust in the psychiatrists. But the Council of Nicea affirmed 17 centuries ago the error of such “forgiveness.”
Read posts 104, 105 and 107, then get back to me.
Nothing with which to disagree, there. There is no central hierarchy of Baptists, however. They're self-policing in these matters, and I will say that, despite your articles, they are vigilant in the extreme in my exposure.
Perhaps the instance described in the article you posted is a very personality-centered congregation that has veered from Scripture. It has happened on rare occasion, and isolation can allow it to fester. I'll join in condemning the behavior of the congregation in accepting and defending sexual predation among those who should lead by example and be the most Godly, certainly not the least Godly, among them.
It's wrong, plain and simple. Even the most casual student of the Bible should know this.
You said “I havent read one post discussing what their churches are doing to implement any guidelines for avoiding sex abuse”
Okay, let me tell you about some of things being done in the United Methodist church- I believe several other denominations have similar programs
In the UMC there is a program called “Safe Sanctuaries”
Among the things required are:
Training for all clergy, Staff Parish Committee chairs (the local HR dept), and anyone working with youth or children (including nursery)
Criminal background checks are required for any position working with youth
If an ACCUSATION is raised the person is removed from their position immediately until resolved; if the accusation reaches a criminal level anyone knowing of the accusation MUST report it to civil and church leaders until it is acted upon by them
All doors to offices (including pastor’s offices) must have clear glass windows so occupants can be observed.
Training includes never being the only adult isolated with a person of the opposite sex or minor.
There are reulations about keeping track of registered sex offenders who might enter the building- and steps that are to be taken to make sure that access is limited to any area that might contain minors and that it have at least two adults present at all times
No clergy member may have a romantic relationship with ANY (even adult) member of the congregation- not member of the church, member of the congregation. This means tha that should a single pastor take interest in a single adult attendee, one of them must remove themselves from the church for the duration of the relationship until they are married. Failure to do so can result in the clergy member being disciplined- to include loss of ordination.
Is it a pain in the butt sometimes? Yes
Is it overkill sometimes? Yes
Has it minimized sexual predators in the UMC? Who knows
Has it removed many of the arguments used by predators to defend the innocence of their actions Yes
It is precisely because of the steps I know to have been inplemented by so many churches that makes me bristle at the equivocation offered by so many members of FR concerning priestly abuse.
If you are at this point, you can no longer honestly say, “I havent read one post discussing what their churches are doing to implement any guidelines for avoiding sex abuse”
One more equivocation removed from some proponents of Holy Roman Conservative Catholicism by a humble member of the wickedly liberal United Methodists
Will
Thank you for reiterating yet again what so many of us have been saying for so long about this issue.
Perhaps the constant repetition will help it sink in for some. Sadly, however, it is likely to continue to fall on deaf ears.
Sources? I presume you have documentation to support this charge?
Guidelines almost identical to those have been adopted in every Protestant denomination that I’m aware of.
One other thing that I know of being done is that there will NEVER be two men doing nursery duty at the same time. If a man volunteers it is always a man and woman and a teen or two. He is never left alone.
This is as much for the protection of the man as the children. It protects the children from the predators and protects the men from false accusations.
Protestants are not living in a fantasy world of make believe thinking that it will never happen in their churches. They are more than aware of the situations which can arise that can bring harm to those involved. Working with the youth these days is risky.
I’ve known of instances, of pastors suddenly departing after meeting with elders or deacons. The usual lead-in is suspicion of financial misdeeds. I suppose it’s possible that gross immorality could lead to a similar hasty departure. I honestly can’t envision it for a criminal matter, though. Baptists are law and order to the core, at least the ones I’ve known and the ones from whom I descend. Back in the day, they’d shun an unrepentant congregant. The same among pastors would have led to his being literally run out of town. Nice, shirt-off-their-backs sort of people but very strict, especially amongst themselves.
Anyone suspected should undergo a through investigation by law enforcement officials and the investigation should run it’s course.
Great satire.
Very cute! :-)
It’s a mote and beam thing, you see! :-)
I would chance to guess none of them, and once discovered none of the congregation covered for them...That is the huge difference between the Catholic leaderships handling of this infiltration and those of Protestant Churches......
....It's the cover-up, lies and deception, for years and years the Catholic Leadership did and does, and then the outright denial this was so....which not only permitted but enabled further criminal acts against children while still denying the facts, making the leadership an accessory to those crimes.
So yes there is a vast difference of how these acts and those who do them are handled. The Catholic Church has failed way beyond acceptable and that is why God is cleaning house in full view of the audience....otherwise it would indeed continue.
Further the Body of Christ are Gods people...not the Catholic churches...nor any denomination of any who claim they are exclusive from the others.
Of course they do....because the crisis IS a Catholic Church crisis.... for few charges have been placed against those Priests, and until people see the offenders charged and tried for their crimes it will remain as it is...a "Catholic Crisis".
God is shaking the Catholic Church out , that’s all there is to it.... The leadership refused for years to rid the church of this investation...so God took upon Himself to do the job...publicaly, otherwise they’d still be shifting Priests from one place to another..but now people know and are watching....every quilty Priest better be watching his back because God is coming at them now for these attrocities.
God is shaking the Catholic Church out , that’s all there is to it.... The leadership refused for years to rid the church of this investation...so God took upon Himself to do the job...publicaly, otherwise they’d still be shifting Priests from one place to another..but now people know and are watching....every quilty Priest better be watching his back because God is coming at them now for these attrocities.
“the seeds are germinating for another bout of this blight.”
Yep..and for that hopefully the whole lid will be blown off!
Regarding “Catholic haters”: I’ve read many religion forum threads over the years and I haven’t seen the “hatred” of catholics you cite. What I have seen is some people who have the audacity to disagree with some or much or even all of what the catholic religion teaches.
The screeching of “catholic hater” in response to someone who disagrees with you reminds me of liberals who throw the word “hate” around at people who disagree with their religion (leftism).
Amen!
If you have an agenda, I am not saying you do, I don’t know, but IF you do, you might express it.
OLW, as a Cathlic, it is interesting to me about the Baptist criminal issue, because I never heard about it before. I am glad to have any evil brought out of the darkness into the light.
Cherry, please tell me you are not serious. Blaming the lawyers who helped the people who were molested by ........priests? No, the priests’ evil acts caused the cathedral to be sold, NOT the victims or their lawyers. Believe me, the Vatican has plenty of resources, billions upon billions to address this. If it wants to let American parishes twist in the wind, well, maybe the American parishes are reaping as they sowed. And I am a Catholic.
Mealy-mouthing about simply won’t do.
Whats to say that protestants ministers in the 60's and 70's weren't buggering andjust weren't getting turned in?
“Whats to say that protestants ministers in the 60’s and 70’s weren’t buggering andjust weren’t getting turned in? “
Oh my! Let’s see if we’re prepared for such an eventuality.
- they aren’t pedophiles, they are pedarasts- there’s a difference
- the main stream media has an anti protestant bias
- these stories always come out during lent. it’s just Satan trying to attack us because we protestants are the true church
- the problem was the lavender mafia that ran the seminaries in the 60’s and 70’s
- many of these preachers were innocent victims of the sexual assaults of young homosexual parishoners
- so what, a higher percentage of school teachers do the same thing
- it’s not a [insert denomination here] problem, these issues were created by the bishops, not the church; identifying it as a [insert denomination here] problem is just a red herring trying to defame all [denomination]s.
- every time this is brought up it’s about a case that happened in the 60’s or 70’s. that problem has been fixed. just more opportunistic media coverage to slur the good name of the church
- let’s wait and see if the preacher is guilty. just because some one makes an accusation doesn’t mean they’re guilty.
- it’s all about the money. that’s all the attorneys care about. if the so-called victims didn’t want money, they wouldn’t need an attorney
- i don’t know how many times i have to say it. there’s no way to hold the head of the denomination responsible, it’s an issue with bishops, who are independent franchise owners acting on their own
- the belief of many psychologists of the day was that keeping a minister in the pulpit, but moving them to a new unsuspecting church, was the best way to treat pedophilia....i mean pederastism....i mean victimhood from sexually agressive youths
today, we know that the best way to treat pedophilia....i mean pederastism....i mean victimhood from sexually agressive youths, is to settle quietly behind closed doors with non-disclosure clauses. psychology has come a long way.
- if only our services were still in latin, this never would have happened
and of course,
PROTESTANT HATER!!!
Whew! It looks like we ARE prepared for such an eventuality!
Will
terrible...
You can check Alex Murphy's posting history too and see..
how come I've never seen you posting this on one of the standard "hate 'em Caflicks" threads?
I agree.
I agree.
OW -- you haven't been doing this, but there are a couple of non-Catholics who only post the above, day in and day out.
yet you can see in post 121, the common refrain that we Catholics here -- here in that post by caww: because the crisis IS a Catholic Church crisis.... for few charges have been placed against those Priests, and until people see the offenders charged and tried for their crimes it will remain as it is...a "Catholic Crisis".
There are posters who are so utterly blinded that they cannot see as you do that this is a common problem.
Quite correct. And one thing is that from 2008-2009, Catholics spent the time explaining to folks who would pop up and say "you believe in xxx" and tell them that was incorrect, to which the answer would be "prove it". When proved, the same poster would not acknowledge this but jump to another topic and then on the next thread repeat the same lie
Finally I guess everyone got fed up with this endless circle and the nasty war of attrition started.
And surprisingly, using fire against fire seems to be the only thing that the ones who started this understand...
Thank you -- I've been saying this for so long and yet many non-Catholics argue to the contrary
What is weird is that some of those even club extreme, Trinity deniers (Unitarians etc.) as Protestants as long as they joined in the "bash-em Caflix"
You seem to be an expert on Catholics v. non-Catholics. And yet, you seem unwilling, or unable to understand just WHY sexual abuse by Catholic priests is a particularly heinous act. It has nothing to do with the physical crime. That is equally disgusting and perverted by both sides and deserves the worst possible punishment. Do you not get what sets the Catholic problem into its own worst light?
Of course, that is the same problem as the tea party. Since there is no organization called “Protestant”, there is no way to control who calls themselves a protestant church. So you end up with a lot of folks using Protestant as “non-catholic”, without much else to filter.
I take personal interest in what the PCA church does, because that is the church I belong to, and have some minor degree of control over. I can’t be held responsible for any other church, whether they call themselves protestant or not, or other Presbyterian churches, or reformed churches. They might share common themes with my particular denomination, but organizationally we are unique and separate.
Can you cite links to vanitys and or Articles that list Catholic sex abuse and I’ll be happy to.
:)
Pitching Christians against Christians is the work of the lord.
The lord of flies.
Feel free to ping me to any that come up and I’ll post and report them to the mods.
So, sexual abuse by pastors is not heinous in your opinion?
You seem to be an expert on Catholics v. non-Catholics. And yet, you seem unwilling, or unable to understand just WHY sexual abuse by Catholic priests is a particularly heinous act. It has nothing to do with the physical crime. That is equally disgusting and perverted by both sides and deserves the worst possible punishment. Do you not get what sets the Catholic problem into its own worst light?
"Particularly heinous" are the key words. Perhaps you don't know the answer to my question. Although any first year catechism student would know. It's Catholicism 101. C'mon, Cronos, surely you know. And want to share your knowledge of the importance of Catholicism, priests, their work on this earth, the Catholic Church and her importance on this earth. With regard to sin and salvation. It's what sets it apart from non-Catholic churches, and sets itself for the biggest fall of them all.
Look here, no one ever said that we don’t condemn this. The thing that sticks in the craw is when you, non-Catholics can only talk about this — so, let’s talk about all the pastors who molest kids too. Let’s all go down the drains. That is the issue.
Sorry, that is not the issue. The issue is, why is it particularly heinous in regards to the Catholic Church. Don’t get the democrat sidestep “they all do it” attitude. You’ll be missing an important lesson in Catholic doctrine.
as Buccaneer said, this wasn't started by us, but now it becomes a war of attrition. You want to discuss theology? Fine. That's good. let's discuss, but isn't is silly to not realise that this attack by the MSM on the big guy isn't an attack on you guys?
From May 3 to June 8th over one Month of his posts I found one on sex abuse and posted on it and reported it:
To: Alex Murphy
How does this help Christianity?
All this does cause hate
19 posted on Wednesday, June 08, 2011 10:17:30 AM by NoLibZone
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2728539/posts?page=19#19
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