This makes for very disturbing reading. Decades, even generations of abuse in the church, and the church knew about it and covered it up!
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/14/us/pennsylvania-catholic-church-grand-jury/index.html
4) For certain individuals, the ones written about long ago as being meant for this condemnation, have wormed their way in—ungodly people who pervert God’s grace into a license for debauchery and disown our only Master and Lord, Yahshua the Messiah. (Jude 4 CJB).
I don’t understand why abuse happens, and what mindset a person must have to want to abuse another person, adult or child, male or female? I say that on the level of just being a human being. Then the added to this we have people in the church, priests, who are supposed to represent the God of Heaven, the creator of all things, who lives in unapproachable light, who founded His kingdom of righteousness, purity and justice, and these people are practicing and hiding up such abominable conduct! Surely this makes people both in and outside of the church look on our faith with horror!
The reality is, people have to face up to the fact that we live in a wicked world. When people masquerade as being righteous, while living disgusting abusive lives, we can see those people have no heart of love for the people. Without love for others, how can we know God. The bible says God is love. The institutions that shields such people are also corrupt, whether that be the Catholic church or any other church or institution. The problem is, people are so conditioned to believe that these churches are the way, perhaps there are just bad elements in the church that need to be rooted out, they don’t acknowledge the concept of the integrity of an institution. We should judge institutions, like people by their fruit. The zeal of people in institutions should be comparable to those in scripture for rooting out sin, not with carnal weapons like swords and the like, but with the spiritual power which God says he gives to all who call on him in truth.
3) For although we do live in the world, we do not wage war in a worldly way; 4) because the weapons we use to wage war are not worldly. On the contrary, they have God’s power for demolishing strongholds. We demolish arguments 5) and every arrogance that raises itself up against the knowledge of God; we take every thought captive and make it obey the Messiah. (2 Co 10:2–5 CJB).
Don’t be mislead by people and institutions who do not live according to God’s Word, who hide their sin, for in hiding their sin, it becomes all the more part of them, rather than something that can be forgotten and washed away by forgiveness. A rot has to be cut out, or the wood treated or replaced, one can not treat it by hiding or ignoring it, as it will only get worse, until the wood has no use.
This is a wake up call to flee what is evil and cling to what is good! If the rot has begun in your church family or denomination and there is no one who is repairing the breach to rectify the situation, GET OUT, FLEE! Yahshua himself talked of this creeping nature of sin and unrighteousness, for he said to beware of the yeast of the Pharisees (Luke 12:1) which is hypocrisy, and doesn’t a little yeast spread through the whole batch of dough?