Why, it was just yesterday that I provided you with 24 links of posts/threads of mine from 2006 and 2007 alone, when you asked a similar question. To borrow your own words from that post, I "gave the lie to your statement".
The purpose of the removed posts indicting the presbyterian ministers' child sexual abuse was to let you and all lurkers know that contrary to protestant propaganda, adolescent/child sexual abuse is not a Catholic problem, it is a problem of all institutions. In fact, one of the worst abusers in the presbyterian church, who moved around from school to school, was a teacher at a school for deaf children. Public schools also have a very high rate of sex abusers of children, probably the highest. The propaganda, and the anti-Catholic bigots' agenda here, is to pretend that the Catholic Church has the only, the worst, and the highest rate of child abuse.
Certainly not the only organization - and I would challenge you to provide me and the lurkers with at least two dozen links to FR statements by Protestants (and at least one of those links must be a statement from yours truly), statements that must say categorically that no abuse has ever occurred in Protestant churches.
But as to non-Catholic charges of the abuse within the Catholic Church being "the worst, and the highest rate"? Those aren't statements of opinionated bias - those are statements that someone can actually prove (or disprove) with math. And yes, those are statements that I have made at times. You're completely free to do the math and disprove me on anything I've ever stated on Free Republic - but there's an old political adage that says "you can't beat something with nothing". I'll even help you out on this one, by providing you with a couple of my choice statements on the matter. I await your well-reasoned, mathmatically-supported responses to the following:
"As you have said (and I would agree), "There have been discussions, letters, articles, programs, announcement of programs, diocesan background checks, and so on." None of which rise to the level of a categorical, public, "no tolerance" condemnation of the practice. All true. But none rise to the level of a public anathema against sexual predators within the Catholic Church. We Reformers got one, so why not the pedophiles and other sexual deviants?"
-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008The John Jay Study (see threads here, here, and outside coverage here) - commissioned by the U.S. Catholic Bishops' National Review Board itself - found that the number of accused Catholic priest abusers equaled four percent of the entire Catholic priest population. The John Jay study's findings are more than conclusive - they're exhaustive of the entire US population of Catholic priests. Surely you're not suggesting that the New York Times would be as more reliable source of information than the John Jay Study?
As I've said elsewhere, every study I've been shown of "Protestant" abuse (which include many of the websites your Google search links to) included volunteers and laypersons. The John Jay Study did not address these groups when they looked at Catholic parishes. If we exclude volunteers and laypersons from the "Protestant" studies (thereby creating a "pastor vs priest" apple-to-apple comparison), we arrive at a roughly 1% abuse rate for all "Protestant" pastors, or (in other words) at least a four times greater likelihood that any given Catholic priest will be a sexual predator, as compared to any given "Protestant" pastor. And that's according to the numbers and studies that Catholics keep telling me about.
Let me throw in one caveat to those comparisons. I found something interesting when I broke down the "Protestant" abuse cases by denomination / affiliation / theological leanings. The more free will / Arminian / synergistic the theology is, and the more independent the association is (as opposed to denominational affiliation), the higher the abuse statistic goes - and conversely, if you just look at the Reformed Protestant denominations, the number of "Protestant" abuse cases statistically drops off the chart by comparison. It's only the average of all "Protestant" pastors that is around 1%. Some independent churches have statistics that are far, far higher than the Catholic average of 4%.
-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008"(S)hould denominational ratios be skewed by independent ratios?"....AFAIK, no one has ever attempted to quantify abuse statistics to show where abuse runs high (or low) among Protestant, Evangelical, and Independent church leadership. My attempts appear to be the first. And I would agree with you that we should compare apples to apples by keeping it ratios to ratios, and not raw numbers to raw numbers. See especially the thread Teachers Vs. Priests - Unequal Treatment In the Media? in which I say
While 25,000 hypothesized "accusations" is roughly six times the number of Catholic "accusations", 25,000 cases out of 1,600,000 teachers gives us a 1.3 to 1.56% ratio of sexually abusive teachers out of the entire public school system over a fifty year period - more than twice the volume of Protestant pastoral abuse, and less than half the volume of Catholic priest abuse.-- Alex Murphy, April 2, 2008If we're after equal treatment in the media, I would expect there to be at least double the number of Catholic news stories as Public School stories, and four times as many Catholic news stories as Protestant news stories based on the percentage of perverts that exist with their respective organizations. IMO the disproportionate amount of coverage is the result of increased interest, when those organizations are caught protecting the abusers at the expense of the victims.
It is not sexual misconduct, rather it is sexual assault, that Catholic priests were accused of in the John Jay Study. The topic isn't "who's accused of sexual misconduct", it's "who's accused of committing a felony against a minor"....Should I consider the intentional conflation of "statutory rape" with "sexual misconduct" to be deflecting attention? Damn straight I do, skippy....Of the 38% of all Protestant clergy being accused of some level of inappropriate sexual contact, only 4.6% have engaged in actual sexual intercourse outside of marriage. And none of them of rape.
If the Catholic apologist were really comparing apples to apples, the real statistics would speak of Protestant clergy accused of criminal sexual contact with minors, or would adjust the John Jay study's four percent upwards to include inappropriate but otherwise legal sexual relations. But the Catholic apologist does no such thing. They start with John Jay's 4%, move on to Protestantism's 38%, and leave the reader thinking that 4% "statutory rape" is comparable to 38% "inappropriate relations". Sometimes you have to keep score, to tell when the other side is moving the goalposts on you.
-- Alex Murphy, September 29, 2009
"...the scandal was never really about the 4% abusers in their ranks. The real scandal was that 66% of bishops covered for the 4%, negatively affecting 95% of the dioceses in the United States - actions which cost the Catholic Church over three billion dollars paid in settlements and awards to the victims."
-- Alex Murphy, September 29, 2009
Here's two more. I almost feel bad for missing these yesterday. They fit in neatly between that April '08 conversation concerning public anathemas against sexual predators and the September '09 discussion about Jerome Lawler's '66% of the bishops were complicit' charge:
I would have expected a religious order to recognize that raping a child is fundamentally a sinful behavior, before they would believe it to be aberrational behavior. It should be a warning sign to everyone that if a religious order looks to "the Psychs" for expert advice on dealing with known sinful behavior, instead of looking in their Bibles for solutions, they prove themselves to be scripturally deficient if not illiterate. "Religious" order, indeed!We should not expect "psychological treatment" will end sinful behavior. That's what many bishops have believed, however, and look at what fruit it has yielded - $3,000,000,000 awarded in damages and settlements by Catholic dioceses within the United States alone.
The only thing that ends sinful behavior is repentance. Check your Bible if you don't believe me.
-- Alex Murphy, May 20, 2009"IMO the church has not made (or at least restated strongly enough) any statement that "such things are an abomination" that Catholics and non-Catholics can equally point to, that categorically applies the condemnation to guilty Catholic priests, bishops, etc. The Catholic Church needs to publicly excommunicate and make examples of the guilty, as a witness to any priest who's even considering preying on his parishioners. And it should go up as high as needed (Roger Mahony, anyone?) until every sympathiser and enabler is rooted out, and purity restored to the priesthood. IOW "put the fear of God in them!"...
... I wasn't aware of any "zero tolerance" policy in the Catholic Church today. I'm a strong advocate of the Old Testament case law (Deut. 19:15) that states "One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established." Yes, there ought to be some sort of "due process" but IMO due process has been (is being?) abused within the American Catholic Church, within certain archdioceses certainly, towards protecting the guilty....
....Sin, confession, and church displine of the same is (or should be) an area inside of [the American bishops'] competence. What's telling isn't that the bishops' received bad advice on how to act. What's telling is what authority the bishops recognized and sought out, when looking for advice...Moreso, I would accuse that the bishops have rejected scriptural authority in favor of (to modify your term) modern pshrinkology. They didn't define the issue (and it's treatment) as a sin problem to be repented of. They treated it as behavior modification....
....IMO letters, papers, and procedures aren't enough, but yes the Catholic Church has taken numerous actions to root this out (although the coloring books are IMO a really bad and tasteless idea). This more-or-less speaks to the first point that I responded to at the top of this post. I'll readily admit one thing, however - the dispute over "proper response" is more of a cultural difference between how Catholics and Protestants address sin than anything else. We like our religious leaders to make public confessions and positional statements re good and evil. I'd daresay that Protestants (at least the pro-creedal kind) place higher value on such public statements than on any actual behaviors towards those same ends. It's hard to judge true repentence when you don't have a matching statement of confession, showing a change of mind to go with the change of action, IMO."
-- Alex Murphy April 2, 2008