Let them get married, that'll solve everything!

https://apnews.com/article/baptist-religion-sɛҳuąƖ-abuse-by-clergy-southern-convention-bfdbe64389790630488f854c3dae3fd5


Report: Top Southern Baptists stonewalled sex abuse victims
By DEEPA BHARATH, HOLLY MEYER and DAVID CRARYMay 23, 2022




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FILE - This Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011 file photo shows the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tenn. Leaders of the SBC, America's largest Protestant denomination, stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over almost two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations, according to a scathing 288-page investigative report issued Sunday, May 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee — and thousands of its rank-and-file members — now have opportunities to address a scathing investigative report that says top SBC leaders stonewalled and denigrated survivors of clergy sex abuse over two decades while seeking to protect their own reputations.
The report, issued Sunday, says these survivors, and other concerned Southern Baptists, repeatedly shared allegations with the Executive Committee, “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC.”
The seven-month investigation was conducted by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm contracted by the Executive Committee after delegates to last year’s national meeting pressed for a probe by outsiders.
Since then, several top Executive Committee leaders have resigned, and the body — under interim leadership — will meet Tuesday to discuss the report. Three weeks later, the SBC will convene its 2022 national meeting in Anaheim, California, and the report will be discussed there as well.

“Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC’s response to these reports of abuse ... and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC,” the report said.
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“In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy – even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” the report added.
The report asserts that an Executive Committee staffer maintained a list of Baptist ministers accused of abuse, but there is no indication anyone “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”
The most recent list includes the names of hundreds of abusers thought to be affiliated at some point with the SBC. Survivors and advocates have long called for a public database of abusers.
SBC President Ed Litton, in a statement Sunday, said he is “grieved to my core” for the victims and thanked God for their work propelling the SBC to this moment. He called on Southern Baptists to lament and prepare to change the denomination’s culture and implement reforms.
“I pray Southern Baptists will begin preparing today to take deliberate action to address these failures and chart a new course when we meet together in Anaheim,” Litton said.
Among the report’s key recommendations:
— Form an independent commission and later establish a permanent administrative entity to oversee comprehensive long-term reforms concerning sɛҳuąƖ abuse and related misconduct within the SBC.
—Create and maintain an Offender Information System to alert the community to known offenders.
— Provide a comprehensive Resource Toolbox including protocols, training, education, and practical information.
—Restrict the use of nondisclosure agreements and civil settlements which bind survivors to confidentiality in sɛҳuąƖ abuse matters, unless requested by the survivor.
The interim leaders of the Executive Committee, Willie McLaurin and Rolland Slade, welcomed the recommendations, and pledged an all-out effort to eliminate sex abuse within the SBC.
“We recognize there are no shortcuts,” they said. “We must all meet this challenge through prudent and prayerful application, and we must do so with Christ-like compassion.”
The sex abuse scandal was thrust into the spotlight in 2019 by a landmark report from the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News docuмenting hundreds of cases in Southern Baptist churches, including several in which alleged perpetrators remained in ministry.
Last year, thousands of delegates at the national SBC gathering made clear they did not want the Executive Committee to oversee an investigation of its own actions. Instead they voted overwhelmingly to create the task force charged with overseeing the third-party review. Litton, pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama, appointed the panel.
The task force had a week to review the report before it was publicly released. The task force’s recommendations based on Guidepost’s findings will be presented at the SBC’s meeting in Anaheim.

The report offers shocking details on how Johnny Hunt, a Georgia-based pastor and past SBC president, sɛҳuąƖly assaulted another pastor’s wife during a beach vacation in 2010. In an interview with investigators, Hunt denied any physical contact with the woman, but did admit he had interactions with her.
On May 13, Hunt, who was the senior vice president of evangelism and leadership at the North American Mission Board, the SBC’s domestic missions agency, resigned from that post, said Kevin Ezell, the organization’s president and CEO. Ezell said, before May 13, he was “not aware of any alleged misconduct” on Hunt’s part.
The report details a meeting Hunt arranged a few days after the alleged assault between the woman, her husband, Hunt and a counseling pastor. According to the report, Hunt admitted to touching the victim inappropriately, but said “thank God I didn’t consummate the relationship.”
In a statement Sunday, Hunt disputed the report.
“I vigorously deny the circuмstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report,” he said. “I have never abused anybody.”
Among those reacting strongly to the Guidepost report was Russell Moore, who formerly headed the SBC’s public policy wing but left the denomination after accusing top Executive Committee leaders of stalling efforts to address the sex abuse crisis.
“Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse,” Moore wrote for Christianity Today after reading the report. ”As dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.”
According to the report, Guidepost’s investigators, who spoke with survivors of varying ages including children, said the survivors were equally traumatized by the way in which churches responded to their reports of sɛҳuąƖ abuse.
Survivors “spoke of trauma from the initial abuse, but also told us of the debilitating effects that come from the response of the churches and institutions like the SBC that did not believe them, ignored them, mistreated them, and failed to help them,” the report said.
It cited the case of Dave Pittman, who from 2006 to 2011 made phone calls and sent letters and emails to the SBC and Georgia Baptist Convention Board reporting that he had been abused by Frankie Wiley, a youth pastor at Rehoboth Baptist Church when he was 12 to 15 years old.
Pittman and several others have come forward publicly to report that Wiley molested and raped them and Wiley has admitted to abusing “numerous victims” at several Georgia Southern Baptist churches.

According to the report, a Georgia Baptist Convention official told Pittman that the churches were autonomous and there was nothing he could do but pray.
The report also tells the story of Christa Brown, who says she was sɛҳuąƖly abused as a teen by the youth and education minister at her SBC church.
When she disclosed the abuse to the music minister after months of abuse, she was told not to talk about it, according to the report, which said her abuser also went on to serve in Southern Baptist churches in multiple states.
Brown, who has been one of the most outspoken survivors, told investigators that during the past 15 years she has received “volumes of hate mail, awful blog comments, and vitriolic phone calls.”
After reading through the report, Brown told The Associated Press that it “fundamentally confirms what Southern Baptist clergy sex abuse survivors have been saying for decades.”
“I view this investigative report as a beginning, not an end. The work will continue,” Brown said. “But no one should ever forget the human cost of what it has taken to even get the SBC to approach this starting line of beginning to deal with clergy sex abuse.”
___
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

The point is there are plenty of married Catholic priests in the Eastern Rite. The Church allows married men to become priests, so it's logical to conclude it's not a bad thing if the Church were to allow married men in the Roman Rite to become priests. Your comment is a red herring, thus, it's irrelevant and nonsensical.

I asked if the Roman Rite would allow priests to marry and would we end up having married bishops.  The red herring is actually the straw man you erected to "refute" my comments, for you responded to an issue that was very specifically not raised.

June 17th 2022

Most Irish Catholics want ordination of women and marriage for priests

Desire for deeper inclusion of LGBTI+ people also revealed after consultation with faithful across all 26 Irish Catholic dioceses

A survey of the 26 Irish diocesan reports has found 96 per cent of people consulted favoured the ordination of women, whether as deacons or priests. Where LGBTI+ people were concerned, 85 per cent expressed concern at church exclusion, attitudes and language, while almost 70 per cent wanted greater lay involvement in church decision-making. Photograph: Filip Singer/Shutterstock

The great majority of practising Irish Catholics favour the ordination of women, marriage for priests who want it, greater roles for divorced and remarried people or couples and single parents, and more respect for LGBTQI+ people.

They also want better-prepared, shorter sermons and the removal of bloodthirsty Old Testament readings from Masses and other liturgies. according to a survey of tens of thousands of believers across the church’s 26 dioceses on the island.

Similar surveys to the Irish one, which will be considered by an 160-strong national assembly in Athlone, Co Westmeath on Saturday, are under way across the Catholic world in preparation for a synod in Rome next year.

`Synodal pathway`
Known as “the synodal pathway”, it began in Ireland last October, with each diocese preparing its own report. Each of the reports, along with some independent submissions, will be collated and edited, before being sent to Rome in August.

It will be Irish Catholics’ contribution to the worldwide Synod on Synodality called by Pope Francis for the Vatican in October 2023.

A survey of the 26 Irish diocesan reports has found that 96 per cent of people consulted favoured the ordination of women, whether as deacons or priests. Where LGBTI+ people were concerned, 85 per cent expressed concern at church exclusion, attitudes and language, while almost 70 per cent wanted greater lay involvement in church decision-making.

Underlining the unprecedented and historic nature of this process, Sr Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, said it marked the first time in 2,000 years that the Catholic Church had undertaken such a worldwide consultation. It is now nearing the end of its first – diocesan – phase.

Addressing Ireland’s Catholic bishops at their summer meeting in Maynooth this week, she said Pope Francis strongly considered this to be the most important phase of the synodal process, as it drew on input from the grassroots. For the church, locally and universally, it was a path they were on and people had no idea where it would end, she said, but everyone should be open to the “surprises of the Holy Spirit”.

Meantime, the Irish Catholic Church will continue with preparations for its own national synod in 2025.

That's your red herring in bold. I never entertained that idea in the first place, so why bring it (and other nonsensical points) up to me in your ignorant and illogical response? You actually invert reality here and accuse me of doing the very thing you did The strawman is yours, too. Again, your responses are irrelevant (b/c married bishops never allowed in Eastern Rite, anyway) and nonsensical. Maybe you have a reading comprehension problem, too.