Differences between Catholic and Protestant abuse cases

[Tietjen]

I think that one of the things that anti-catholics will do in such a case is ignore it unless it is within their particular community. So a report of a priest on the news supports his anticatholic position and a report of another “protestant” would only apply if it was the “right kind” of protestant.
In other words, instead of looking at ALL the abuses among the various denominations they would only look at their own. They might say something like - Well there’s 200 reports among priests but only 2 among Baptists (if that is his particular community).

Fortunately such people are few but they do exist.

Peace
James

Well yes, but not for the sake of arguing but rather to shed light on the truth of the matter, you could then compare percentages because to not do so is to avoid a realistic picture. For example, what kind of Baptist is he/she? Freewill? Southern, American, (there are many) then find out the world-wide size of that particular Protestant denomination. Let’s suppose its 100,000 world-wide. In 2007 there was an estimated 408,024 Catholic priests serving 1.174 Billion Catholics (ref: Christian Today Magazine). Now how many ministers from this particular Baptist denomination are there? 75? 100? 500? 1000? Break down the amount of abuse cases in this Baptist denomination and compare it to the Catholic priests; remembering to take into account the total population of the particular denomination as opposed to the total population of the Catholics in the world. My point is that one cannot simply use raw numbers and say, “The Catholic Church had 200 accusations filed against it for sexual abuse in 2009 and my Baptist church only had 1, therefore my Baptist church is less likely to experience this type of travesty against its children as those Catholics over there.” If there are only 5 cases, world-wide, of child abuse in a denomination that only has 100,000 followers that’s 1 out of every 20,000. If in the Catholic Church (who has over 1 billion population) we have 200 cases, that’s 1 out of every 5 million. BOTH numbers are too high; however, using math, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that this particular Protestant denomination has a VASTLY higher rate of sexual abuse amongst its followers than does the Catholic Church. But of course it’s not politically correct to point this out to Protestants. It’s much more “fun” for them to point out the faults of the “big kid” and ignore their own larger problems.