Posted on 07/07/2008 5:31:50 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
Tom Koldeway will never forget the first time he was abused by his family's trusted priest nearly 40 years ago. And he'll never forget the moment years later when he learned he wasn't alone.
"I was sexually molested as a boy," his older brother, John, blurted out one day in 2003.
"My heart stopped," Tom says now. "I said, 'Oh my God - you, too?' "
It turned out the brothers weren't alone, either: Their sister, Mary Kay, also accused the late Harold Robert White of sexually abusing her.
"You hear the same thing from every survivor: It never ever occurred to you that there might be someone else - it never enters your mind," says Tom, who was molested by White for eight years beginning at age 9. "This guy was a serial predator. Everyone he came into contact with, he was sticking his hands in their pants."
The Archdiocese of Denver announced Tuesday that it settled lawsuits filed by the Koldeways and other victims of White, who died in 2006.
(Excerpt) Read more at rockymountainnews.com ...
How so?
I would call the systematic tacid approval, facilitating the horrors by simply giving the pedo-priests a new parish as feeding grounds, and lying to the victims families who USED to implicity trust the Church are what really sets the Catholic Church apart.
That might be true.
I have no dog in this particular fight, but I'm curious. Common thought and statements by all kinds of "experts" place the percentatge of Catholic priests who are homosexual is between 15% and 50% (of course, some of them are celibate and not all of them who are sexually active are pedophiles). The percentage of Catholic priests who are homosexual is certainly believed by most of the U.S. population to be higher than the percentage of the general public that is homosexual.
Your statement suggests either that studies show that the percentage of rabbis and Protestant pastors/ministers is also higher than the general public, or that the percentage of Catholic priests who are homosexual is lower than generally thought and about the same as the general public.
What do the studies suggest?
That's not a combative question. I'm curious.
I keep hearing the claim, but not the evidences upon which it purports to be supported - just that there are "as many Protestant leaders who abuse children as there are Catholic priests." Okay. Let's assume for the moment that this is true. Adherents.com has a list of the number of church assemblies for the top ten religious bodies with the most churches in the USA. The list is below (using only denomination and # of churches, since I don't want to do a table - full data is at link):
Southern Baptist Convention - 37,893
United Methodist Church - 37,203
Catholic - 22,400
Churches of Christ - 13,092
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) - 11,416
Assemblies of God - 11,144
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America - 10,899
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - 9,207
Jehovah's Witnesses - 8,547
Episcopal Church - 7,299
Now, let us assume generally the same rate of # of clergymen per individual church across denominations, accounting for the fact that in small, rural districts, you may have just one or two parish priests in a Catholic chapel and a pastor and assistant pastor in a country church, versus your big city and suburban cathedrals and megachurches with up to dozens of clergymen in various positions. Just among the top ten listed above, you would have 22,400 Catholic churches versus 146,700 non-Catholic churches. This doesn't even take into account all the other non-Catholic groups that didn't make the top ten list, like the Independent Baptists or the Quakers or the Congregationalists or the Lutheran Church, Wisconsin Synod, and so forth - groups which would inflate the number of non-Catholic bodies even more.
But, using only the data from the Catholics and the other nine of the top-tenners, if there were the same number of naughty clergymen with the Catholics and with the other nine combined, you would have a naughty clergyman rate with the Catholics that is roughly six and a half times higher than the non-Catholic groups.
That is not statistical noise.
Yes, every group has its bad apples. Yes, the Baptists (my own group) has its men who engage in gross and notorious sin. Nobody denies that. The issue, however, is the disparity in response to the problem. Typically, when a member of the pastoral staff abuses a child, that man will be removed from his position, and find himself in trouble with the police. That is the correct response. The Catholic church's response, until recently at least, was to shuffle the offending priest off to another diocese halfway across the country, so the priest could start the same cycle of abuse somewhere else. That is not the right response to an offence such as child abuse.
My reason for posting all of the naughty priest articles of late is not simply to antagonise Catholics and insult their religion. It is to point out the hypocrisy of people like Coleus, a Catholic on here who gets his jollies off of posting articles about naughty clergy from everybody else, while conveniently forgetting why it is that the Catholic church, and not these other groups, has the reputation for gay, child-abusing clergy. I'm reminding him and others on here that they need to clean up their house, instead of thinking that posting a few stories about other groups is going to somehow exhonerate the Catholic church of its culpability in a serious, notorious case of widespread, systematic criminal coverup.
If the churches had listened to (and continued to listen to) what the Bible had to say, instead of to the extra-biblical arguments of a heretic like Augustine, we might not have nearly the issue with clergy child-abuse as we have now.
What’s the point in posting this?
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