It is not good, but I was expecting it to be much higher for it to be truly rampant. In any case, if a Protestant church covers up such cases, they get just as much blame from me as the Catholic Church. Apostates must be removed and I can't imagine a child abuser being anything but apostate.
Once again, the point is missed. The Roman Catholic church considered their "clerical" law superior to US law and they did not report known incidents and offenders to authorities. They hushed it up, shuffled priests to new towns to do their same dirty deeds again, and used donated funds to buy silence from victims. They bypassed the law, enabling and abetting future criminal behavior from known predators.
Beyond their arrogance and belated (sincere?) remorse, they have made no pledge to correct the problem. They will continue to tolerate future incidents (two times, you're out--but one time?) They also refuse to deal with the basis and nature of the real problem--homosexuality among priests. It is thought that 40% of the priesthood is homosexual. These men will continue to do what they have done because it is the nature of the beast. The pedophiles among this group are limited. Most of these cases of abuse had victims who were male (pedophiles prefer females by a slight margin) and these victims were mostly entering puberty, not leaving it. Many of these relationships were long-term.
The ranks of the American Catholic church are filled with some sick dudes--either covering up, enabling criminals, or doing the dirty deed themselves.
Who really wants to take a communion host from a guy when you don't know where his hands have been last? Who really needs to hear their "advice" on matters of divorce and birth control (muchless the pathway to Heaven) when they have condoned anything as long as it was the behavior of one of their own?
The only people who can vote on items of business for the denomination are "messengers" elected by their home church. Pastors are usually among those elected, but a pastors vote carries no more weight than the vote of a 13 year old boy, if he [the boy] has been elected on of his church's messengers. Each church is allowed a maximum of 10 messengers.
If the pastor of some church is found to be a child molester, the local church takes care of it. The members of the church, including the family members of a molested person, would have a great deal of influence as to what then happens to the pastor. I know of no instance where such sexual misconduct did not result in dismissal by the individual church if they believed it to be true. It may have happened however somewhere down the line.
But each church owns its own property, writes its own constitution and by laws, and calls its own pastor. The denomination has no say in the matter. The only thing that could be done, if, as happened a few years ago, a church called a homosexual pastor, is the messengers might vote in their local county association, or state convention or national convention to "withdraw fellowship" from that church, and publicly state that the church is "not in friendly cooperation with our other churches. In other words, we would not accept their members into our church from that church unless they were repentant. But that church would have to deal with their own pastor, budget, property, members, etc.
There is no college of cardinals or bishops to move pastors around as Catholics [and Protestants like Methodists] do. Each church is autonomous. But messengers can elect representatives to fire seminary teachers or denominational employees for false doctrine, or moral and legal malfeasance.
Sometimes it works well. And sometimes vindictive people in a church will fire a good pastor, or will fail to discipline an ungodly church member. But that individual church and its members have to live with the consequences of their behavior.
If large percentages of church members disagree with one another on an issue, one group may "split", buy their own property and build a new church. If the new church agrees in polity and theology with Southern Baptist doctrine then the new church will be admitted to fellowship in the local association and national convention based on a vote of the messengers from the other SBC churches in the area.
If anyone is still reading this, at least you now know the difference between a heirarchical denomination, ruled from the top down, and a congregational denomination, ruled by the grass roots from the bottom up. The standard for all of these practices is to be taken from the Bible which is the only recognized ultimate authority in SBC life.
Agreed--but it is the institution and hierarchy of the Catholic church which enabled the priests' long evasion of justice. A Baptist minister would be facing his congregation outside his office door--maybe expecting a rope!--and the congregation can certainly fire him and publicize his misbehavior. That's not as easy in the Catholic church.
All said, I pity deeply the faithful Catholics who must now deal with the lawyers! What good will it do to bankrupt the Church? Think of the schools, the hospitals, the missions...