"Alice, you highlighted my comments, but then made a completely irrelevant response. I asked for your opinions comparing similar religions with similar roots to the Watchtower, so why repeat information condemning Catholicism. As reprehensible as I feel Catholicism has been, it is a huge monolithic organization that has made tremendous changes considering its size and history. Witnesses have displayed a similar struggle coping with pedophile issues with its elders, even though it is far smaller and easier to manage.
It is even more pointless to use Dawkins as the source against Catholicism, as I can guarantee that if you asked for Dawkins opinion on Witnesses he would strongly condemn them as dangerously deluded."
I've been in the organization most of my life and there's not a pedophile issue in Jehovah's Organization that can be distinguished from any other organization. For starters child abuse, physical or sexual is a societal problem. This is an in-depth psychohistorical study of childhood and society.
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html
The History of Child Abuse
by Lloyd deMause
The Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998
The only reason abuse would be concentrated into a specific demographic is because there's a psychological mechanism involved that is separate from the rest of society.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/mar2002/chur-m29.shtml
Why the epidemic of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church?
As deplorable as the abusive priests’ conduct is, we are not inclined in this case, as in any other, to attribute it, in the words of John Paul II, to the “mystery of evil.” The priests in question are not monsters, they are human beings, some no doubt originally motivated to join the Church by idealism. They themselves are victims, of the Catholic Church itself.
The attempt by Church officials to blame the behavior on a few individual predators, overcome by evil, is absurd. That the abuse is a long-standing and worldwide phenomenon demonstrates it is not aberrant behavior, but something ingrained in the institution and its practices. Contrary to the pope’s view, there is hardly any “mystery” whatsoever about the source of the misconduct: it emerges ineluctably from the inhuman and unnatural celibacy requirement and related medieval teachings and practices of the Church on human sexuality, associated with the doctrine of man’s Original Sin. After decades, or perhaps centuries, of concealment, the psychologically perverse consequences of these teachings and practices have been exposed for all to see.
The crisis over sexual abuse by members of the priesthood underscores the profoundly reactionary and anachronistic character of the Catholic Church as an institution. Its corrupt and hypocritical officials, living like kings, preach against sin and vice, oppose birth control and abortion, inveigh against homosexuality, enthusiastically advocate censorship and intellectual repression, universally ally themselves with the powers that be and generally make life miserable for tens of millions of people.
This mass of social reaction and backwardness must find reflection in personal relationships both within the Church and between priests and parishioners.
There are a host of questions bound up with the abnormal psychology often found in the priesthood that are beyond the scope of this article. Eugene Kennedy, a former priest, now married, has written about the issue. In regard to previous sex abuse scandals, he writes about “revelations of the miserable, furtive, and immature personality growth of many priests, of which their preying, helplessly, on young boys, helpless, was a major symptom.”
The Catholic Clergy take a vow of secrecy upon ordination.
