Posted on 02/11/2011 7:11:53 PM PST by Dr. Eckleburg
A grand jury on Thursday accused the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of failing to stop the sexual abuse of children more than five years after a grand jury report documented abuse by more than 50 priests.
The new report said a senior church official charged with investigating allegations of sexual abuse by priests had in fact allowed some of those accused to remain in posts that gave them continued access to children. It charged him with endangering the welfare of minors and accused three priests and a teacher of raping two boys between 1996 and 1999.
“By no means do we believe that these were the only two parishioners who were abused during this period,” the report said.
At least 37 priests who are subject to “substantial evidence of abuse” are still in roles that bring them into contact with children, the new report said, and 10 of those have been in place since before 2005, when the last grand jury made its allegations...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Did I say that the Boy Scouts don’t have the problem at all?
Go back and re read the post and post 60. Stop believing the lie that people don’t recognize that it happens elsewhere as well.
What I said was that the Boy Scouts are doing a BETTER job of dealing with the issue and protecting their boys tahn the Catholic church is doing.
Not a perfect job, not never happens there. A better job.
The Catholic church, with the moral high ground it takes, should be leading the way by example of how to deal with sexual exploitation of others by its clergy and it hasn’t.
They are in no position to point fingers about other’s sin, condemn them for lack or repentance, claim to exercise their alleged God given role to loose and bind the sins of others when they won’t even deal with the sin in the ranks of those who are alleged to have the power to refuse to remit sin and damn someone to hell as a result.
The hypocrisy is appalling.
WHAT slander?
Catholics on FR have hardly shown love to those with whom they disagree. You may be different, but don't paint either side with a broad brush.
If liberals have infiltrated your own church, then KICK THEM OUT. But don’t accuse us of slander for pointing out what everyone knows to be true.
How can you accuse us of slandering the RCC when things like this book admit that what we say is true?
Again, the criticism isn’t that stuff like this happens. it’s expected to for a variety of reasons. The criticism is int he inept and incompetent dealing with the matter.
Instead of dealing with it promptly and severely, the RCC has dragged its collective feet and in doing nothing has given its priests no reason to NOT engage in this kind of abominable behavior.
But they don't move troop leaders from one unsuspecting troop to another, now do they?
They problem, that the Papists don't want to admit is that the Roman Catholic Church has been systematically hiding pedophile priests.
That is the issue.
Even the Papists here on FR will deny the Roman Catholic Church's guilt in this. We will see:
-Denial. Well just look at the Boy Scouts and teachers. We have the same problem as everyone else. Never mind that an institution that calls itself a church is held to a higher standard.
-Ad Homs Anyone that dares to call this what it is, rape, is a rabid anti-Catholic. How dare they say anything against Rome!
-Deflection "Well, it's the homosexual priests and the boys are teenagers." It's almost as if teen-aged boys seduced the priests! Never mind that girls and young boys have been raped.
When there is a concerted effort to cover this high up, one can only assume the abuse goes all the way to the top.. and they risk exposure themselves
It’s time for Philly to take out the trash!
That's what you get when you fall for the fairy tales put out by your religion instead of looking in the scriptures to see what God has to say about it...And He says plenty...
Your religion is not the church Jesus Christ built...Your religion is condemned by God all thru the New Testament...
Without reading this thread I'm sure RC's have offered the defense that until the priests are convicted they shouldn't do anything, "innocent until proven guilty", after all. In something like sex abuse it makes sense to have law enforcement investigate before jumping to conclusions.
However, until the investigation is completed any accused should be removed from contact with any children. For example, my church had a church worker accused of sexual abuse at a summer camp we run. Our pastor told us of the accusation on the first Sunday following the accusation. The individual accused was pulled from the camp and all contact with children. Police were called immediately when the accusation was made. A couple weeks later our pastor told us that the investigation had been completed the accused had been cleared of all charges and that we should pray for the accuser because the accuser suffered from a mental disorder. All this was done with no secrecy and as a result no one expressed any concern about having their children around the wrongfully accused camp worker.
A policy of open disclosure has never been the RCC practice. This alone is why they should not be trusted.
The Catholic church, with the moral high ground it takes, should be leading the way by example of how to deal with sexual exploitation of others by its clergy and it hasn’t.
MM you are being too kind. Where exactly is the RCC near the moral high ground on an issue?
What a bunch of "poor me" rot. It is your church that calls Born Again Christians "separated brethren". It is your church that calls Evangelical Churches defective, sects, protestants, and assemblies, but never churches. It is your church that fails to teach it's members The Gospel. It is your church that requires all submit to it in order to be in good standing with it.
Your church with it's exclusionary anti-Christian attitude and flawed theology separated itself from Christianity. Born Again Christians pray for the lost RC's to believe The Gospel and be freed from the RCC, but never for the beast that imprisons people.
Martin's wife, Kristal Martin, also pleaded for a lesser sentence. The Martins have a 4-year-old son, and Kristal Martin is pregnant with another son due in October. Tears streamed down her face as she addressed the court as her husband sobbed quietly at the defendant table.
Kristal Martin said her husband has undergone counseling that "has changed him completely.
"We have a son who loves his dad very much," Kristal Martin said. "Consider mercy so that our children might have the opportunity to be with their dad. I love him very much."
There is more but the point is that even outside the RC, people close to the predator tend to think they have changed or want to believe it badly enough to hope it won't happen again.
I meant the moral high ground it professes to be taking.
Or perhaps the moral high ground it claims, would have been a better way of wording it.
Sorry.
REALLY? They hired him knowing he had admitted guilt in court to use of children in a sexual performance??? Is that not incredible?
And cults and heretics. Don't forget that we're called cults and heretics by the Catholics.
That sounds like hate and despise when you're on the receiving end and not the giving end.
Oh, I'm sure it is!! This is just so.....so........amazing! The documents.....of course......why didn't I ever think of reading Catholic documents?
Tell it to me again.
Just how bad is the Roman Catholic church??
Is any of us really safe?
Don't be Sister. Sometimes I just let go.
From same article....
“The decision to hire Williams was sharply criticized at the time by several members of the congregation, and he was removed Thursday following a vote by church officials.”
They were wrong to hire him, but it was not done with unanimous consent.
Fortunately, he was removed although how he got in in the first place is a mystery.
I daresay, that is not representative behavior or policy for Baptist churches as a whole.
"On Sept. 26, The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts notified lay leaders of the First Baptist Church of Winchester that their pastor, the Rev. Lawrence French, had been found guilty by a church panel of sexually molesting three boys between 1960 and 1982.
"But First Baptist is a congregation that reveres its pastor. And so a dozen church elders decided unanimously that French, who says he is innocent, should remain as pastor. Convinced that the 72-year-old pastor could not have committed the alleged offenses, they also concluded that it would be unfair to French to notify other members of the church about the allegations."
OK? Do you see it? There are other churches, protestant churches, in which the accused are protected and the accusation is kept silent.
It's not just Rome. Hope you can see that now...sometimes it is just human nature.
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