Just a little perspective on this disgusting problem of failing to root out or screen for these perverts before they get to where they can be in a position of trust.
MORE PROTESTANT MINISTERS GUILTY OF PEDOPHILIA THAN CATHOLIC PRIESTS, NEW RESEARCH REVEALS
A Penn State historian, Philip Jenkins, has done an in depth research of pedophilia and sexual abuse among the clergy and has come up with some rather eye opening facts. It seems that while 1.7 percent of Catholic clergy have been guilty of pedophilia (or sexual abuse particularly of boys), a whopping TEN percent of Protestant ministers have been found guilty of pedophilia!
This is all the more interesting, notes Jenkins, since there has been NO media term “Pastor Pedophilia” coined at all!
Jenkins theorizes that the media, proving the ‘point’ of the ‘necessity’ of sexual promiscuity, overemphasizes any instance of pedophilia found among the Catholic clergy since it can use this to criticize the entire idea of celibacy. But it is interesting that the NON Celibate Protestant ministers have a MUCH GREATER problem with it than the celibate Catholic priests!
Protestant pastor pedophilia is not within the frame of our ‘social constructionists’ as Jenkins calls the media:
“In the 1980’s, [Pastor] Leyva had abused perhaps one hundred boys in several Southern states, but few of us ever learned of it. Leyva had the distinction of being a Pentecostal minister and was, therefore, not within the ‘frame’ of those who were busy constructing reality. The same is true of the three brothers, all Baptist ministers, who were charged with child molestation in the 1990’s; the public learned little about this highly unusual series of cases because it was not deemed worthy of dissemination by those fixated on Catholic scandals.” [1]
“Once the media elites focused their attention on framing the issue in terms of the ‘celibacy’ problem, it became difficult for them to assert that the problem was larger among the non-celibate Protestant clergy.” [2]
Jenkins’ research was based on several highly respected studies and statistics. He points out that whereas sexual misconduct has always been a problem, among Catholic and non Catholic clergy as well as among the general populace, what is new now is that the ‘problem’ of priest sexual abuse, constructed by the media as a result of a ‘moral panic’ occurring in the mid 1980’s.
Sue Widemark
Endnotes:
1. Donahue, William A “A review of Philip Jenkins’ PEDOPHILES AND PRIESTS, “Catalyst”, Vol 23, no. 4 (May 1996) (published by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, email: jpan2so@execpc.com)
2. ibid
“MORE PROTESTANT MINISTERS GUILTY OF PEDOPHILIA THAN CATHOLIC PRIESTS”
1. This doesn’t make Catholic child abusers any better.
2. It doesn’t change that the Catholic hierarchy shuffled around these abusers and covered up for them.
3. It doesn’t change that the abuse is apparently still happening in Catholic institutions.
4. It doesn’t change that the Vatican is infested with homos.
...in short, it may or may not be true that you can find worse abuse somewhere else on earth. THAT IS NEVER AN EXCUSE NOT TO CLEAN YOUR OWN HOUSE NOW - AND QUIT COVERING IT UP AND ENABLING IT!
Until those things happen, Catholic child abuse will continue to reverberate in the news.
It is sad everywhere it happens.
The problem with comparing anyone to anyone else with this particular topic is the acknowledged and pervasive amounts of cover-ups going on with these cases.
With the Roman Catholic Church the numbers will statistically exceed that of any single Protestant denomination just for the fact that 1.2 billion people on the planet are Catholics and the single largest Protestant denomination is only 16.3 million people.
The RCC, with it’s global reach and vast resources, has been more effective at executing these cover-ups and the current Pope has alluded to his challenges in confronting these practices.
For the time being comparing the RCC and any other denomination (favorably or unfavorably) is pointless given the acknowledged unknown extent of abuses that have been covered up. Many of which will likely never be revealed.
In the meantime the best anyone can do is to expose these crimes to the public regardless of who commits them.
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]