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I kept hearing about all these scandals going on in the Catholic Church. I would hear about scandals from the east coast to the west coast and even in Europe. The secular press was relentless in making sure the public knew about all these scandals. And my non-Catholic and Evangelical friends were more than happy to bring this up, the moment that they found out that I was Catholic. I am hard on the Evangelicals because most of the criticisms were coming from the Evangelicals. On the other hand there are some Evangelicals who are not this way; in fact they are very caring and understanding. Here are the words of one Evangelical who in her humility didn’t have a need to trash the Catholic Church on the basis of scandals. She wanted the truth to be known about the sexual abuse she experienced as an Evangelical.
On another occasion a Baptist minister warned not to gloat because very soon the second shoe may fall and Evangelicals will have their own sex abuse scandals brought out in the open. This minister saw the big picture and saw no need to throw dirt at the Catholic Church. Why did the Catholic Church seemingly have this huge problem and other Christian and secular groups seemingly did not? I later found out that the Protestant arena had as large or larger problem with sex abuse among their clergy than the Catholic Church, according to the insurance companies that insure them. And there was a much larger problem in the secular world. When I was working at the post office I had an Evangelical colleague tell me how shocked he was about the sex abuse scandal going in the Catholic Church. I was left to wonder why he was not shocked about the huge child sex abuse scandal in his own Baptist Church. Apparently he was either unaware of it or was in denial of it. For those who claim there is no problem, I would suggest that you go online to, Baptist sex abuse scandals. Then there was my friend who attended Elm Brook Church, who was wondering, “What’s the big deal in the Catholic Church, why are these scandals happening?” She didn’t have long to wait, about six months after asking this, there was this child sex abuse scandal involving a youth minister in her own Elm Brook Church. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 5th, 1999 was quoted as saying “Any church — any organization — would have difficulty dealing with the overwhelming tragedy that has struck Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, where seven boys have said that youth minister Daniel Varga sexually abused them. As the investigation was beginning, Varga committed suicide.” My compliments to the press, the Journal Sentinel, who I would say gave them very compassionate coverage. From the secular press in general if this happened in the Catholic Church with their heavily non-Catholic bias, they would say “if only priests could marry,” as though this was the solution to the problem. Where does this type of thinking come from? It comes from articles on any number of anti-Catholic sites on the internet. These articles allege that the reason for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is forced celibacy. Forced celibacy is not in the teachings or practices of the Catholic Church or in the Bible; it exists only in the minds of those who wish to believe it. Celibacy is in the teaching and practices of the Catholic Church and in the Bible. The youth minister at Elmbrook was not involved in forced celibacy and yet, he was involved in a child sex abuse scandal. He was married; why didn’t that prevent the problem? I was left to wonder, if the youth minister at Elmbrook would not have committed suicide, would this child sex abuse scandal have even made it in the local press?… …The information is out there, and the secular press is silent in its reporting of it.
Some people are acting like modern day Pharisees pointing out the sin of others while not acknowledging their own sin. “The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous –or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithe on my whole income’” (Lk 18:11-12). They are busy confessing the sins of others rather than their own sinful scandals…. Click here for the whole Article by Dave Armstrong |
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This Post Has 4 Comments
90% of the Emerald Isle attended Mass every week a half century ago. Today the churches are almost empty.
Father Gerard Moloney wrote in The Irish Times. “The church has provided its enemies with weapons of mass destruction. It has no one to blame but itself.”
Secularism and luekwarmness in the Western World was already forewarned by Our Lady of Fatima 100 years ago. That is part of the apocalypse.
In the light of what you said, it is clear that one of the lessons to take away from all of this is the need to pay attention to people like Sister Faustina. In her diary she had already said (in the 1930’s) that during a vision of the scourging, Jesus told her that this represented sins of impurity. She was amazed to see not just laymen, but priests, religious, and high ecclesiastics doing the scourging. In the book To the Priests, Our Lady’s Beloved Sons, there are a number of messages that speak of this problem as well; for example, one on May 18, 1977, where Mary’s message states, “Often it is precisely priestly and religious lives that have become veritable cesspools of impurity.” These writings are called private revelations and are often given almost no importance by otherwise devout and well informed Catholics. Like Jews in the Old Testament, we are indifferent to anything heaven might say about solving our problems; we’d rather do it ourselves in our own way. That’s why we are in the mess that we are in now.
Thank you for posting this article. Even as a protestant for over 40 years, I had no idea that sexual abuse was such a problem in its ranks. Recently I’ve been considering Catholic claims, but was put off by sex abuse within Catholicism. But now that I’ve read this article, and verified from several sources that this issue looms large in protestant churches, I have gained perspective. Abuse of children must end wherever it occurs. But stopping it will be much more difficult in “independent” protestant churches that are accountable to no one. Ironically, no New Testament church was ever independent of either other churches or of the apostles and their authority. Let’s all pray for this blight on our Christian faith to end, so that our Lord Jesus will be honored.
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