Is the Roman Catholic Church really a Criminal Cover-up organization?
Scandals in Europe, Africa, South America
Is the Roman Catholic Church really a cover-organization for a vast gang of rapists and child abusers? History seems to point in that direction. Look at the scandals in Europe, the Caribbean and South America? Priests and Bishops are caught more often and are actively involved in the cover-up of crimes against children, young and adult men and women. And these crimes rarely provoke a direct response by the Church. Did the former Pope really resign for health reasons, or was he afraid to get caught red-handed? The lack of response by the present Head of the Roman Catholic Church in fact means it is not a religious organization at all, because even the Pope seems to be involved in the cover-up. Alleged sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church has involved an estimated 16,000 victims and 3700 Roman Catholic clergy (Bishop Accountability 2011; Bohm et al. 2014).
The Pope holds a very important position, not only as leader of the largest religious organization in the world, but also as a respected politician and statesman. If that position is compromised by the current wave of discoveries, then the Church itself is in danger. And not only the Roman Catholic Church, with it all Christian organizations and churches will be smudged with the dirt that is spreading through the organizations.
Do Protestant and Christian Churches not have a history of abuse, sexual abuse and child abuse?
From 2005 to 2010 more than 300 reports of sexual abuse in pastoral relations were made from evangelical and protestant churches in the Netherlands. (Source EO, a Dutch evangelical TV station.)
When these numbers were published in September 2011 the leadership of the non-Catholic churches announced measures to stop the abuse in the Dutch Christian Churches by making the perpetrators confess in public.
But no announcements were made as to criminal persecution or banning perpetrators from holding church offices.
Except for a few loosely related studies that have examined issues surrounding sexual misconduct and abuse by clergy (see, for example, Chaves and Garland 2009; Garland and Argueta 2010; John Jay College 2004), investigations into alleged child sexual abuse in Protestant Christian congregations has been limited.
Since the Boston Globe’s (2004) report on the molestation of 130 boys by Boston Reverend John Geoghan of the Catholic Church from 1962 until 1993, academic studies attempting to uncover instances of sexual abuse within religious, primarily Catholic, environments have increased in number. John Jay College (2004), for example, was granted unprecedented access to official Catholic Church records, finding that 4% of all priests within the US from 1950 to 2002 had some sexual abuse allegation(s) made against them. Moreover, this study revealed that the alleged instances of sexual abuse involved nearly 11,000 children with a mere 3% referred to law enforcement authorities (Terry and Tallon 2004).
The revelation made by the John Jay College (2004) report made many members of Protestant Christian organizations question the extent of abuse in their congregations, as well as to question their protocols for preventing and controlling such abuse in their congregations (Bailey 2013).
The overwhelming majority of studies that have been published on this topic have focused on either individual cases of abuse, how to stop abuse from occurring, how to recover from such instances of sexual abuse, or some combination of those. Even though the above issues are crucial for study, there is even less information about what offenses occur, where they physically take place, and who offends. This information is especially crucial when considering the three key reasons why religious leaders have the strong potential to engage in sexual abuse. These reasons are;
(1)The power of access throughout the church and victim accessibility;
(2)The power from not being under the surveillance of others; and
(3)The power over congregants by being privy to personal knowledge (e.g., marital issues and addictions).
(4)The power of being sure the leaders will cover up the crimes committed.
(5)The money that is given so freely by church members, it provides a lot of power!
This is the link between churches and the crimes committed under their roofs, and criminal organizations the world over. Organized crime can only operate in a relatively free environment if the three of the four power conditions are met.
The fourth condition is in fact at stake here. Criminal Organizations like the Mafia can exist only with the knowledge of some negative information, and the ability to pressurize people into paying to keep that information a secret. Gangsters know something about you and have goons to beat you into paying.
The perpetrators of sexual abuse within religious organizations are often privy to very private information about their subjects. The priests and pastors not only know the legal data, date of birth, date of marriage etc, but are often persons of trust and confidence. People talk and confess to them about their deeper secrets. Extramarital relationships of mum and of dad are often known to priests as well as to other church leaders within the non-Catholic communities. People will often talk in confidence about their past, including criminal records, refugee status, addictions and so on.
Two-way traffic.
So even parents can be forced to work along in the cover-up of abuse situations. If they want some information to remain secret, they are open to blackmail!
Remember, it is not only the sexual abuse by priests and pastors that needs to be covered up, there is a stream in two directions at play here. The priest or pastor wants to cover up the access to (young) victims of his sexual abuse and the leaders of the churches and others, do not want that negative information about a member of their church, or about the church’s clergy, to come out into the open. As a consequence they have now become possible victims of blackmail.
Because priests as well as leaders of Christian congregations, are relatively free to move from one post to another, transfers are used to cover up for crimes committed in the last held position. A pastor who is transferred to a new post, there is no suspicion there, it is accepted as normal. A parish priest who is “promoted” to a new parish and replaced by another person, nobody will see a problem there.
But how many of these transfers and promotions are in fact part of the system the church uses to cover up sexual abuse, child abuse or other crimes? A member of the Mafia who becomes a problem for his superiors is often transferred. To kill him in this day and age is counterproductive, it will only draw attention. Churches have used an intricate transfer system since they came into existence. Churches are known to be politically involved, in some countries openly, in other countries in a more covert way. But the result is the same; churches have power. The Vatican is a State as well as the headquarters of a Church.
Is it all part of the power play that is needed to nourish a great gang of sexual perpetrators, money launderers and child abusers? Are the heads of churches really convinced Christians, or are they only after money and pleasure?
It may be true that many of the characteristics of churches are the same or similar to the characteristics of criminal organizations. It also may be true that people are abusing and misusing their position within churches, this does not mean all churches are criminal organizations. We have to keep an open mind, a very careful open mind.
Continued examination of sex offenses that occur at or through activities provided by Protestant Christian churches is crucial, with millions of youth estimated to participate in church-sponsored activities on a regular basis in the US and in other countries, with thousands of males in key power positions. Thus, the potential for continued sexual victimization remains high.
Unless future research continues to examine this important topic, effective prevention, investigation, and intervention methods cannot be fully developed to counter such issues of sexual victimization within the estimated 314,000 Protestant Christian churches currently in the United States.
Sources: Child Sexual Abuse in Protestant Christian Congregations: A Descriptive Analysis of Offense and Offender Characteristics Andrew S. Denney 1,* ID , Kent R. Kerley 2 and Nickolas G. Gross.
Originally published at http://gonenative99252506.wordpress.com on April 19, 2019.
