Below is the Guardian article by Stephen Bates. As you read down you will find JW's mentioned along with the Catholics as having serious problems with child molestation issues. Think about it, a year ago this would have been unheard of, yet due to the efforts of so many who are no longer silentlambs, around the world JW's are comming to be compared with the Catholics when it comes to hurting children. Everyone is coming to know WT policy hurts children, yet the GB steadfastly maintains they will never change their policy.
What does Jehovah do with "stiffnecked" people? Stay tuned much more is in the works. Run Wt Run.....
silentlambs
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Archbishop pays for Catholic church's complacency
The removal of Archbishop Ward following a string of paedophilia scandals is just a small part of the church's efforts to improve its unsavoury reputation, writes Stephen Bates
Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent
Friday October 26, 2001
When the Vatican acts it can do so quite ruthlessly. Today, John Aloysius Ward, the recalcitrant Roman Catholic archbishop of Cardiff, was summarily removed from his post by the Pope himself in the wake of a series of scandals in his diocese involving paedophile priests.
Archbishop Ward, who is 72 and so theoretically had nearly another three years to go before reaching retirement age, did not want to go and had incautiously given interviews to local newspapers and the more reactionary Catholic press stating his intention to stay.
He went to Rome last week for a half-hour long one-to-one with the Pope to press his case. His answer has come swiftly and humiliatingly in the citing of Canon Law 401.2, which gives the pontiff power to remove a diocesan bishop who, "because of illness or some other grave reason has become unsuited for the fulfilment of his office". Only the Pope could order him to retire.
Since Archbishop Ward claimed in his ill-fated interviews to be in the peak of health some other reason for his departure must be deduced. In truth he had to go and perhaps only an aged and long-serving bishop would ever have thought he could have stayed. For Archbishop Ward had harboured not one but two paedophile priests, both of whom are now serving jail sentences for offences against children.
The first, Father John Lloyd, was the archbishop's press officer, the second, Father Joe Jordan, was ordained by the archbishop in 1998 in the teeth of warnings from a fellow bishop that he was unsuitable. Jordan, who had earlier been banned from teaching even stayed for a while at the archbishop's house but Ward earlier this month was still claiming that he had no idea of his proclivities.
Jordan, who coached football as a pretext to meet young boys, was jailed for assaulting two nine-year-old boys. In the current climate of the church there was no excuse for Ward's behaviour. He acted in defiance - or ignorance - of guidelines adopted in 1994 intended to prevent such disasters occurring.
Archbishop Ward has not been helped by his arrogant and obstinate manner that has turned many priests and congregations in his diocese against him - including all the canons he himself appointed to assist at his cathedral - and which led him wilfully to refuse to see the writing on the wall when the Papal Nuncio to Britain - the Pope's ambassador - wrote to him earlier this year suggesting he might retire quietly.
Since 1994 and continuing problems, of which the Jordan case was one, the church has brought Lord Nolan and an independent committee in to recommend even tougher rules for clergy and church workers in an effort to reduce the risk still further
The Catholic church has been saddled with the public humiliation of a series of high-profile cases of sex abuse by priests and is desperately trying to overcome the scandal. In fact, Catholic priests - and other clergy - are statistically much less likely to be sex offenders than other groups but every case produces shame and damaging headlines.
About 28 priests have been convicted since 1995 and new cases crop up every few months - only this week a priest in Reading was arrested for possession of pornographic images on his computer.
Other churches have their problems too and have been much more hesitant in dealing with them. The Jehovah's Witnesses, who face a string of court cases in the US, decline to investigate allegations unless there are two independent witnesses and advise parish elders to burn any complaints set down in writing.
But, in a climate where the church knows it has to be seen to be above suspicion some of Lord Nolan's remedies are drastic, including police checks on every candidate for the priesthood, child protection officials in every parish, annual diocesan reports and even glass-fronted confessionals so that a priest hearing confession from a child is in view at all times.
Some in the church think this is going too far but Archbishop Ward has paid the penalty for the decades of complacency that preceded such moves. Whether the new guidelines will remove the church's unsavoury reputation however only time will tell.