The usual response of JWs to negative reports coming from the media is 'Don't listen to it. It's Satan's persecution against us. You can't believe a word they say.'
Witnesses react the same way to remarks/judgements by judges, attorneys, the courts, and psychotherapists saying they are all part of Satan's world.
But not always! When the same media, legal, and medical sources report negative findings about another religion, Jehovah's Witnesses embrace and quote from those reports.
Below are several paragraphs from an Awake! magazine in which Watchtower has no problem quoting 'Satanic' sources regarding the sexual misconduct of Catholic priests. These are the same sources, and the same reports, that JWs reject when the light is shining on them.
Also, notice how the problems reported are a dead ringer for the Jehovah's Witnesses' sexual scandal today.
Sources quoted
- U.S. News & World Report (quoted twice)
- NCR (National Catholic Reporter)
- Psychotherapist Richard Sipe
- An attorney (quoted twice)
- Canadian Press
Problems reported
- Sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests
- Many spoke openly about being victimized by pedophile priests
- Sexual abuse (continually hammered by Watchtower)
- Psychological abuse
- Church refuses to listen to victims
- Church fails to take accusations seriously
- Protecting the offenders
- Clergy preserves privilege and power more than serving needs of people
- Institutional denial
- Looking the other way re sexual abuse by priests
- Tolerated sexual abuse by priests
- Covered up sexual activities of priests
- Lies about sexual activities of priests
- Law suits, not surprisingly
- Victims seek justice thru Church first
- Law suits are a last resort.
(Awake 4-8-1993, p31)
“DURING the past decade, some 400 Roman Catholic priests have been reported to church or civil authorities for sexual abuse of children,” according to U.S.News & World Report. Recently, a national gathering of survivors of such abuse was held near Chicago, Illinois. Many spoke openly of how they had been victimized by pedophile priests.
But NCR (National Catholic Reporter) notes that speakers sounded another theme repeatedly throughout the conference: “The first abuse is sexual; the second and more painful, is psychological.” This second abuse occurs when the church refuses to listen to victims of abuse, fails to take their accusations seriously, and moves only to protect the offending priests. “Fairly or unfairly,” NCR reports, “they portrayed Catholic clergy as belonging to an unhealthy and misguided group more bent on preserving privilege and power than in serving lay needs.” Several speakers made ominous comparisons to the Reformation, which split the church wide open in the 16th century.
According to Richard Sipe, a former priest turned psychotherapist and expert on sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, all this institutional denial reveals “a deep, desperate and knowing personal involvement in the problem.” He added: “The church knows and has known for a long time a great deal about the sexual activity of its priests. It has looked the other way, tolerated, covered up and simply lied about the broad spectrum of sexual activity of its priests.”
Not surprisingly, then, many abuse survivors are suing the church. NCR quotes one attorney who specializes in such cases as saying that there are pedophile-priest cases in each of the church’s 188 dioceses in the United States. He says that out-of-court settlements have run as high as $300,000 per case. U.S.News & World Report says that such suits have already cost the church $400,000,000, a figure that could surge to $1 billion by the year 2000. And the Canadian Press reported recently that some 2,000 survivors of childhood sexual abuse in 22 church-run orphanages and mental institutions in Quebec are suing six religious orders for $1.4 billion in damages.
Interestingly, though, the aforementioned U.S. attorney, who represents 150 victims of pedophile priests in 23 states, says that he has never yet had a client who was eager to go to court. Each one first tried to seek justice “within the pastoral context of the church.” NCR concludes: “Survivors go to the courts, it appears, not as a first resort, but as a last resort.”