Stephan: There is a very strong linkage between male clergy, male dominance, and inappropriate sexuality. Everyone knows it, but you never read or hear about clerical authorities doing anything in their training about it. The Roman Catholic Church has been notoriously guilty of priests who can't keep their hands out of the shorts of little boys or the panties of little girls, and in the last several decades has paid out billions of dollars to victims of clerical lust. To a point where certain dioceses have been bankrupted by the payments. But as has become clear, and this report is the latest such account, this clerical predatory sexuality is hardly limited to Roman Catholics. Today a report that arose in response to a growing outcry in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, makes it clear that there is little difference between Baptist clergy and staff, and Roman Catholic clergy when it comes to sexual abuse.
Even more disgusting the report also makes it certain that the Southern Baptist leadership, seeing what happened to the Roman Catholic Church, consciously and deliberately suppressed reports of inappropriate Baptist clerical sexual abuse fearing what it would cost them if the stories ever got out and they were held accountable.
A session of the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Nashville, in June 2021. Credit: Mark Humphrey/Associated Press
National leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention suppressed reports of sexual abuse and resisted proposals for reform over the course of two decades, according to a third-party investigation published by the convention Sunday. The report also said that a former president of the denomination was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2010, an accusation the report described as “credible.”
Sexual abuse allegations, and the church’s handling of them, have roiled the convention for years. After mounting pressure from survivors of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist settings, delegates at the denomination’s annual meeting last summer voted overwhelmingly to commission the report, and demanded that its 86-member executive committee hand over confidential documents in cooperation. The report covers abuse reports from women and children against male pastors, church employees and officials from the year 2000 to the present.
The reckoning in the Baptist denomination comes after the larger, long-running sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has affected thousands of victims […]
