(September 11, 2018 at 12:32 pm)Khemikal Wrote: The link I already gave details one such incident, and their own internal process (there that is again) figures that about 2/3rds of their churches have this problem of known abusers in the clergy.
I would be incredibly surprised to find that the UU had engaged in -as many- of these sorts of shenanigans..on the basis of their relative infancy and reach alone...but I'm not the kind of guy who splits hairs on account of one smaller church (one we might even hope to be the outlier) engaging in a little less of the very same crime.
The monolithic hierarchy of the RCC makes them a more convenient target than smaller and more diffuse sects. IMO. You should see the self reported stats for evangelical leaders......
Personally, I'm tired of hearing about repentance and reconciliation. They can engage in their religious fetishes over some other issue.
I'm not finding any details about a coverup in the link you provided. It's not clear from the comments in that article that there was any attempt by the UU to coverup those 2/3rds cases, or that they engaged in practices similar to the Catholic church. Indeed, that they even have an internal process tends to run counter to your claim.
In particular, the link you did give notes the following:
Quote:“We at the UUA don’t want to add to the pain of an already painful situation,” said Lammert, who reported that the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) has investigated twenty-three complaints of sexual misconduct in the past twenty years. None involved purported abuse of a minor or vulnerable elder. Two ministers were exonerated, eleven were removed from or resigned their fellowship, and the remaining ten were reprimanded or suspended from service.
Quote:In the 1970s and ’80s it was not uncommon for ministers to have relationships with congregants and then to divorce their wives, Pope-Lance said. Some preyed on parishioners, engaging in multiple affairs. Some routinely made inappropriate sexual remarks to women—what we now call sexual harassment. “General Assemblies in the 1970s could feel like Carnival or a Roman bacchanal,” Pope-Lance said in her 2011 Berry Street Address to the UU Ministers Association.
In the early ’90s, three instances of UU clergy misconduct brought national media attention. In the most shocking case, the Rev. Mack Mitchell was arrested and convicted in 1992 for raping a teenage girl he had helped to emigrate from Tibet. Mitchell lost his job and ministerial fellowship, after members of the Massachusetts congregation he served raised an alarm. He was imprisoned for three years.
Fox Television’s A Current Affair aired a segment in 1991 in which a camera crew confronted the Rev. Tony Perrino in his driveway about accusations that he had sex with multiple parishioners from his California church. He was removed from ministerial fellowship in 1990 but has continued to preach occasionally at UU churches. (Update 11.10.14: After this issue went to press, Perrino died at the age of 86.)
In the highest profile case, New York magazine in 1991 ran a blistering feature about the beloved minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan, the Rev. Dr. Forrest Church, who left his wife—the religious education director—to marry a layperson he had been counseling about her marriage. In emotional upheaval, the church voted on whether to keep him as minister. They voted yes. Church served until his death from cancer in 2009.
So that's one example where a UU church voted against disciplining an unethical minister, and that itself was an act by the laity, not the institution per se.
(Material taken from Reforms take aim at clergy misconduct.)
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