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Dear Alex Murphy,

“...it leads me to ask where did the statistics come from?”

I've never seen comprehensive statistics on Protestant clergy abuse of children. There are fragmented statistics that suggest perhaps at least 400 cases per year or thereabouts (which would have been 20,000 kids over 50 years). But the documents I've seen are fragmentary and likely don't paint the whole picture, and I'm not really sure of the complete context in which they exist, so I usually avoid referencing them.

That was kinda the point of your post - that I was comparing overall sexual abuse by Protestant clergy - which appears to involve roughly 2 in 5 Protestant clergypersons - with sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests - which appears to have involved roughly 4% of priests - or about 1 in 25 - over the past 50 or so years.

As I said, I've never seen comprehensive, in-depth statistics as exist in the John Jay study, requested and paid for by the Catholic Church, for Protestant clergy. I just figure that the Protestant powers-that-be just don't have the guts to do what our bishops did.

sitetest

Not only that, they may not have the means. In congregational churches, there are a lot of deals that are cut, where a compromised pastor has enough support among the “deacons” to cut a deal. He departs and gets to keep his reputation as he moves on to another congregation. There may be no paper trail. It is pretty much the same game in the public schools, where a teacher plays around with a young cutey, or at least is accused of it. He then moves on, maybe to another state, and his former district does not bother to warn other districts for fear of trouble.

I've never seen comprehensive statistics on Protestant clergy abuse of children. There are fragmented statistics that suggest perhaps at least 400 cases per year or thereabouts (which would have been 20,000 kids over 50 years). But the documents I've seen are fragmentary and likely don't paint the whole picture, and I'm not really sure of the complete context in which they exist, so I usually avoid referencing them.

Yet conclusions have been formed and applied and prosecuted anyway. From post #56:

...in fact, the Church is correct. The clergy from non-Catholic Christian denominations commit inappropriate sexual improprieties at rates which appear to exceed that of Catholic priests. I saw one study that showed that 38% of Protestant clergy had inappropriate sexual relations with their congregants, and fully 12% of these relationships had been consummated in sexual intercourse. This study was of self-reporting Protestant clergy. In other words, the researcher surveyed Protestant clergy, and this is what they admitted to the researcher....
....One study showed that roughly 7 out of every 400 female congregants in Protestant ecclesial communities had been taken advantage of sexually by a Protestant clergy person. I don't know how they're counting congregants. Everyone who claims to be a Protestant Christian? Or just folks who are registered in Protestant communities? Or just folks who actually show up on Sundays? In any event, based on the percentages we've already discussed, that suggests that somewhere between a couple of hundred thousand and a million Protestant congregants have been sexually taken advantage of by a member of their clergy. Yikes!

Still no authoritative source for these statistics has been provided. Still the conflation of "sexual misconduct" and "felony assault" is being made. Still the goalposts are moved, and after wiping one's hands the only acknowledgement forthcoming is 'I've done nothing wrong.'

As I stated before, the real scandal was that 66% of Catholic bishops covered for the 4% of sexual predators among Catholic clergy. Their actions negatively affected 95% of the dioceses in the United States. Their actions cost the Catholic Church over three billion dollars paid in settlements and awards to the victims. Two-thirds of the bishops. Roughly the same percentage that chose not to speak out when Notre Dame honored Obama last spring. Coincidence?

Let's see the comparable statistics for Protestant clergy who intentionally cover up rapists and felons within their ranks.

[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.