Patheos blog
February 16, 2019
By Hemant Mehta
The Southern Baptist Convention is currently embroiled in an investigation about how it harbored sexual abusers for years. A report by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News found that, over the past decade, more than 250 staffers or volunteers with Southern Baptist churches were “charged with sex crimes” against more than 700 victims.
If all of that sounds eerily familiar, it’s because the Catholic Church has been exposed for its own (larger) problems sheltering and covering up for sexual abusers.
Now, writing for Religion News Service, Rev. Thomas J. Reese has an excellent list of ways the two scandals are different. In fact, he says, the Southern Baptist problem actually debunks many of the myths spread by critics and defenders of the Catholic Church.
For example, how many times have you heard people blame the Catholic Church crisis on its policy of celibacy? The Southern Baptist scandal shows that treating sex as a sin for ministers isn’t the problem:
… Many liberal critics tried to blame the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church on priests’ vow to abstain from sex, yet Baptists are having the same problem, and there is no equivalent requirement for SBC ministers. Most Baptist predators are married men. There are good reasons for married priests in the Catholic Church, but marriage does not prevent a man from abusing.
Similarly, Church defenders often blamed the abuse on gay priests… but most (if not all) of the Baptist ministers are straight.
Is the Catholic Church’s abuse problem exacerbated by its hierarchical structure? The Southern Baptists don’t have that structure, yet the abuse thrived.
You get the idea.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.