Posted on 08/16/2018 9:46:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This week a grand jury reported on documents from six Catholic Church dioceses in Pennsylvania that revealed 300 “predator priests” have been accused of sexually abusing over 1,000 children.
The grand jury report states: “We believe that the real number – of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward – is in the thousands. Most of the victims were boys; but there were girls too. Some were teens; many were prepubescent… But all of them were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all.”
This report has sent shock waves through the world, akin to the 2002 Boston Globe report on a priest accused of molesting more than 80 boys who was shielded by the Catholic Church.
The grand jury rightly stated: “There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale.”
The Catholic Church is not alone. Many churches and religious institutions have been accused of perpetuating sexual abuse, to various degrees.
In Evangelical Christian church circles, amidst the #MeToo movement, high-profile leaders have been accused of sexual assault. Leaders like Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, was forced to retire after it was reported that he told a rape victim to forgive her attacker instead of calling the police.
Further, in 2017 an assistant pastor at Agape Bible Church in Thornton, Colo., got 13 years in prison for sexually assaulting a young girl repeatedly for 2 years. The police discovered that church leaders and the girl’s father decided to not contact the police and to simply handle the matter “internally.”
In the Mormon church, there have also been scandals, such as the recent case of Joseph L. Bishop, a retired president of the Provo Missionary Training Center, who admitted to molesting at least one female missionary. News reports state that the victim reported the incident to her local bishop, but that the local bishop ignored it because he “wasn’t going to risk sullying the reputation of someone based on that kind of a report.”
In 2017, six Mormon families tried to sue the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for allegedly covering up child sexual abuse by a church member of children as young as 4 and 6 years old. And another suit against the Mormon church claims “Native American children were sexually abused while enrolled in the church’s Indian Student Placement Program.”
There have been accusations of sexual abuse amongst Orthodox Jewish Rabbis, international Buddhist leaders, Muslim pilgrimages, and more.
The list could go on and on.
The hierarchical structures, theology, and policies vary wildly between these different institutions, and so likely will their collective responses and solutions. Each institution will handle allegations of abuse differently – but there can be no doubt that heightened media attention surrounding these issues is socially beneficial for putting churches of all faiths in the hot seat to update and enforce vigorous measures for effective, correct justice in light of abuse.
Many people are asking: why does sexual abuse happen in churches? The heartbreaking reality is wherever there are people – especially when some have greater power or authority than others or where an institution desires self-preservation – there is the possibility of sexual abuse. Sometimes the power differential is in the boardroom at work. Sometimes the institution seeking self-preservation is a Hollywood production company.
And sometimes, the scene of sexual abuse is the church.
If you are a member of a faith community, inquire with your church about the policies and procedures for reporting sexual harassment or abuse. Clarify if leaders are ever left alone with children, at what point after receiving a report the church would call the police, and talk to both fellow members and leadership about ways these policies and more could be improved. Consider asking them to adopt Keeping Children Safe’s international child protection standard, which has been adopted in more than 4,000 organizations worldwide. Ask the church to post this information publicly as well.
Let’s strive for churches to become places of reform, healing, and justice.
-- Haley Halverson (@HaleyCHalverson) is Vice President of Advocacy and Outreach at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
“Rule One: No Poofters!”
Which is why the KGB spent huge amounts of time and treasure infiltrating seminaries.
Why is this not common knowledge?
KGB == communist
Big Media == communist
demoncRAT Party == communist
Big Education == communist
Hmmm ...
See a pattern?
It goes along with the idiotic and false notion that the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party was somehow “right wing”.
Even worse Catholic seminaries were actively soliciting queers as far back as the 70’s. St Mary’s, where I worked part time was virtually 100% homosexual student body. ALL homos are pedos, by definition and nature.
Some on this forum will castigate you for telling that truth.
I am not one of them.
Satan has all the evil people he can devour at will...withered, decaying souls, unsatisfying fare. He is determined to eat the fat, juicy souls of religious people who fall for his temptations of mind, body,and soul. Can you think of a better target than a pastor or priest?
“because some churches decided to enable homosexuality in the ranks of their leadership”
No such decision was made by the Catholic Church.
The USSR spent huge amounts of time and treasure infiltrating agents into seminaries. As those first agents rose to positions of authority, they opened the floodgates to more and more faggots.
It is true that those agents hid behind the authority of the Church to work their evil, but they had no legitimate right to do so. Nothing they pretended to do or say in the name of the Church was, in fact, an action of the Church.
We are talking about an attack on the Church, not actions by the Church.
It is distressing that some Protestants refuse to see the true nature of these events, incorrectly blaming the Church for Satan’s attack on her. I have learned over the years that these people cannot be reasoned with, so I no longer try.
It appears that Bill Donahue of the Catholic League has actually read the report. It’s not 300 priests. Included are the usual deacons and choir masters and other employees of the Church. Many of them are dead and so can’t speak up for themselves - because the accusations go back to WWII!
This is not to say there isn’t a problem. But, as usual, the media isn’t doing its homework because it is not in their interest to do their homework.
Yes I’d heard these cases go back over 70 years
“Even worse Catholic seminaries were actively soliciting queers as far back as the 70’s”
The KGB commenced its efforts in the 1930s, so they would have had a number of agents placed in seminaries by the 1970s.
Who knows what filth writhed in their depraved minds as they sought to pack the priesthood with sodomites?
I also think that people who continue to give to these churches full well knowing what is going on are enabling the situation to get worse and worse.
“Homosexual men do not all want to trick, groom, and abuse young boys”
Change that to “young men and/or boys,” and the answer becomes, “Yes, they do.”
Amen! Excellent post.
“The church didn’t read their own Bible when they let them join.”
The Church has never authorized sodomites in the clergy. They get in by lying.
“Show me the church that comes anywhere CLOSE to the catholic church in it’s perversions and evil. There is not one.”
Sorry, but you have been misled by the evilstream misleadia and its fake news.
Run the numbers, apples to apples.
Also reflect that when they complain that the statute of limitations has run, they are saying that these things happened a long time ago.
“Yet without an extremely clear, almost reactionary response against such sin and top-to-bottom Church recognition of it - the sin, in all forms, will automatically seep into the Church, its followers, and its leaders.”
I used to gnash my teeth at John Paul II’s failure to take action. I had hopes for Benedict XVI, but he fizzled, and now we have...
Given the reluctance of Catholics to drag faggot priests out of the Church and fling them in the gutter, we can only pray.
Why?
Let’s get back to basics: Means, Motive, Opportunity.
When someone is put in a position of respect and authority, he (and she for lesbo teachers, but we’re talking about the Church here) has Means and Opportunity.
The self-sacrifice of celibacy is supposed to remove motive. But if it doesn’t, and it clearly not only doesn’t for some clergy, but encourages motive... well, there y’go. The trifecta is present.
I kept an eye on my boys’ sports coaches. I had a liberal friend who called me homophobic, but he was a fool.
There’s no way they could have reached the positions of power they are in now if no one knew anything. At some point you have to acknowledge that not only have they been allowed to be part of the church, they are now running it.
RE: ALL homos are pedos, by definition and nature.
Some permutations. You tell me which is/are true:
All Pedos are homos
Not all Pedos are homos
All Homos are Pedos
Not all Homos are Pedos
Which one applies? All or some?
Exactly, and if you look around you can find an amazing number of different well funded groups which you'd think were on different sides of every issue who put a lot of money into placing their people in seminaries and the lay ministry or administration of large parishes.
The fact that this is all the result of a long time plan is actually obvious from the fact that the media formerly known as mainstream along a very large percentage of non-Catholics yelling and waving their hands over this actually praise people for "coming out" as queer, deny that there are only two genders, deny that adult males molesting children is typical homosexual behavior, and deny that pedophilia is a perversion when anyone but a Catholic is involved.
There's nothing quite so obviously agenda driven as a dolt like Dolan saying one day, "good for him" when someone "comes out" as queer, then acting upset over his queer pals in the clergy behaving like the queers they are. The way the hierarchy hid the truth shows that people like Dolan who now infest the Church are actually upset that these people were caught, not that they committed the sin of pedophilia or pederasty.
They were sexual predators using the patina of religion to make access to young children easier.
Toss them out, turn whatever monsters are left (who haven't died of old age yet) over to the legal system and pray they die in prison before being met at the gates of hell.
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