Saturday, August 25, 2018

Not Just a Catholic Problem

8/25/18 Philadelphia Inquirer:
Chessa Manion insists she's not looking for revenge, or to spark an ugly confrontation, when she heads to Berks County this weekend.

The plan that she and a group of former Jehovah's Witnesses have cobbled together is fairly simple: They'll gather in front of the Reading Santander Arena on Sunday with signs and artwork, and try to catch the eyes of some current followers of the millenarian religion who will be streaming into the building for a convention that's expected to draw thousands from Pennsylvania and Maryland congregations.

For some of the ex-Witnesses, it'll be a chance to share painful experiences that they tried to bury for years — in Manion's case, the rape that she suffered as a 5-year-old at the hands of a teenage Witness in a small Illinois town in 1994. Others hope to encourage active Witnesses to question the organization's leaders, who have responded to a growing number of child sex abuse cases around the world with denials and instructions to destroy records that could prove harmful in litigation.

3 comments:

  1. As far as I can tell, and also what I was told in training about this, any organization that focuses on kids has this problem. Schools, churches, Boy Scouts, etc.

    You keep hearing about the Catholic Church for three reasons:


    1) It is the largest and most prominent organization that fights against the sexual mores of the modern progressives (which includes the people who write and choose news stories). The left *loves* the scandal, and they love to lie about it and call it a paedophilia scandal when over 80% of the cases are homosexual statutory rape, and a significant amount of the rest is heterosexual statutory rape.

    2) It is especially galling when people whose job it is to be holy act in vile ways

    3) US culture has a very long history of anti-Catholic feeling, and anti-Catholic myths. This is a result of our large population from the UK, which had just crushed the Catholic Church (look up what a "priest hole" is (by outlawing sometime) as North America was being settled, and banned Catholic worship and schools in the Popery Act of 1689. Not surprisingly, 1689 Bill of Rights denied Catholics the right to keep and bear arms. Of course, this was part of a larger political revolution, but the anti-Catholic feelings and propaganda became part of our heritage.

    Growing up as a protestant in the US, I encountered the American anti-Catholic historical inaccuracies quite a bit. But, I didn't realize all the lies I had been told until I married a Catholic who has a deep knowledge of Catholic history.

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  2. Nor, for that matter a "religious" one, either, as problems in the public schools with statutory rape and so many Hollywood moguls outed thanks to the #metoo movement.

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  3. StormCchaser: Well aware of the history of anti-Catholic feeling. I just have never encountered it. My father told me the stories told in 1920 when Al Smith ran for President: Every Catholic Church in DC had an artillery piece behind the altar which would be used to attack the Capitol. When I looked at him funny, he said, "Well it had only been 350 years since the Inquisition," and laughed.

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