Catholic abuse investigations expand.

[The Grand Nudger]

It’s almost like there’s something fundamentally wrong with these religious institutions. Something that should be addressed by the legal systems that have jurisdiction in their areas.

What do I know though? God will handle it I’m sure.

Besides, they all feel real bad about it...and it won't happen again,  swear to christ.

[Mister Agenda]

No institution where the hierarchy has access to children...in fact, any organization that is hierarchical...is immune to this kind of thing. The instinct of members of an institution is to protect the institution, especially when it's their livelihood. It takes policies and safeguards and a willingness to follow through on them even if it hurts the institution and/or bucks authority, to root out predators. It strikes me that believing your organization is carrying out the will of an all-good deity presents an additional obstacle to due diligence in holding members accountable for sexual misconduct.

[Bob Kelso]

What’s the going rate for punishment these days in the Catholic church? A Hail Mary or two for each choir boy you bent over and a semi-permanent vacation to another hunting ground?

Edit: Sorry, said hunting ground when I meant another church. Damn autocorrect.

[Angrboda]

I think what really gets people is not necessarily the sexual abuse itself, that will and does happen anywhere, but the complicity involved in covering it up and facilitating further abuse by shuffling offendors around to different venues. If the UU church is doing likewise, then that's a valid complaint against the UU. But just finding abusive ministers within a UU congreagation is not really comparable to what the Catholic church is being accused of doing. Is there any evidence that the UU organizations are doing similar things? Is there any evidence for Episcopalians?

Granted, there is the charge that churches are being hypocritical about claiming a higher source of morality and then not living up to it, but that's a separate concern than the coverup.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yes, and yes.  A simple google search will disabuse anyone of the notion that this is a particularly catholic phenomena. As people have noted, the tendency of an institution is to protect itself and seek a situation where fallout is handled internally and minimized publicly.

[Angrboda]

Yes, and yes.  A simple google search will disabuse anyone of the notion that this is a particularly catholic phenomena.  As people have noted, the tendency of an institution is to protect itself and seek a situation where fallout is handled internally and minimized publicly.

You'll forgive me if I don't simply take you at your word, but a) I'm not finding specific citations of the Unitarian Universalists in general, and b) I'd like to see whether the institutional abuses of the UU and the Episcopalians actually compare to those of the Catholic church.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

[Angrboda]

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:

“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.

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.)

[The Grand Nudger]

As much as the abuse she documented in her 2005 complaint pained her, Emily says she was “absolutely devastated” by what followed. “I was shut out of the process, treated like a bother by UUA staff, silenced and asked to protect the minister, and ultimately not told the findings of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, the credentialing body for UU ministers,” Emily told trustees and top UUA staff earlier this year. “I remember hearing the words ‘closed door tribunal’ to describe what was happening in the [Roman] Catholic Church, and I remember that resonating.” She has not joined a church since.

INB4 "Just a few cases" and "The odd minister here and there".

[KevinM1]

An exception that proves the rule - a priest serving Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston was arrested, with the Church actually calling the cops on him: https://boston.cbslocal.com/2018/09/11/c...brookline/

Of course, this guy is an easy target given his background (Nigeria). It's not like Boston doesn't have its share of racist fuck heads despite being otherwise a very liberal city. Still, at least this guy was arrested and not simply shuffled off somewhere else.