An all-male brotherhood rife with sexual immaturity;
seminaries that have failed to adequately teach students how to live chaste lives;
and a faithful flock that raises its priests to an elevated status that in the case of my own family member, was horrified to find his elders invading the beds of innocent 18-year old recruits in his Florida seminary.
His sponsor was an uncle from the Sierra de Guanajuato region of Mexico, a former Vatican canon lawyer who fluently spoke 8 languages and was aghast to learn of such aberrant homosexual behaviors.
It is the church's silence on such matters of the flesh, its secrecy in dealing with wayward priests and its blind protection of the men in its own ranks that have catapulted it to deserved controversy.
When the real church is raptured, RCC may continue to conduct its business in any manner it sees fit. AMEN!
You think protestant churches haven't had their share of problems with this? It's almost a stereotype in some circles about how any youth director that's not just starting out after graduating has to be watched...
And I have had students come up and tell me stories of abuse they had when they were at nicely thought of protestant run religious schools.
And I have known too many groups that hustled up and covered the problems they had with sexual scandals in their own congregations.
No church has clean hands, because all churches are staffed by humans who give in to sin from time to time. I suggest you might want to review the parables of the wheat and tares and the parable of the net.
When we cross that threshold and stand in the presence of our redeemer, you may be quite surprised at who is there, and what churches they came from.
No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirt, and we say it a lot in this church you are happy to condemn. We can happily say with the writer of Hebrews, For which cause I suffer also these things: yet I am not ashamed; for I know him whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day.