UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Burke E. Strunsky
Prosecutor
Faith is a deeply personal experience, and I don’t say this as a politically correct sound bite. I truly believe that I’m lucky to live in a country that values the right of its citizens to freely practice religion if they so choose. However, as a criminal prosecutor, I am repeatedly faced with situations in which people forsake reason for faith or forsake faith for reason. It’s a false dilemma–a needless collision of choices. Too many make the tragic mistake of relying solely on their faith in cases of crimes, particularly child sexual abuse. Some religious groups might see these events as strictly a crisis of the soul when, in fact, concealing these atrocities only contributes to even deeper spiritual crises for the victims and their families. That’s why I make this plea to families of all faiths: Please do not rely exclusively on the guidance of your religious institutions to deal with the crime of child molestation. If people truly believe in God or a higher power, then they should open their minds and hearts to the possibility that, in addition to their capacity to believe, they also possess the ability to reason for a reason.
It’s impossible to pinpoint the first primordial whispers of faith or even the birth of religion–itself a communal kind of faith. Since the earliest man tilted his head to the cosmos and wondered, “Where does it all come from?” humanity has been searching for the meaning of life. Regardless of one’s personal beliefs, faith and religion appear to be distinctly human phenomena, pointing us in the same direction toward the same intangible reality of a higher purpose or an unexplainable force that guides and connects us. Thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that in the search for truth, humans possess two unique sources of knowledge–reason (natural) and faith (supernatural)–and that the two were never meant to contradict one another but rather to work together.
Secrecy is essential to the crime of child molestation and when it encounters the sacred secrecy inherent to some religious organizations, an atmosphere is created in which the predator can thrive. Psychoanalyst Sue Grand has studied child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and sums up the crisis from both psychological and religious perspectives: “Secrecy, concealment, denial, ambiguity, confusion: These are Satan’s fellow travelers, requiring elaborate interpersonal and intrapsychic collusion between perpetrators and bystanders. The operations of silence potentiate evil and remove all impediments from its path.”
Historically, the most prominent religious organizations involved in criminal and civil child sexual abuse cases included the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church).This certainly doesn’t mean that people who belong to these groups are more likely to sexually abuse children than are, say, Methodists, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, or Hindus. Rather, it’s the manner in which these institutions have sometimes handled sexual molestation accusations that is problematic. It often leaves the pedophile free to roam and attack again.
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