Absolutely.
But the church won't own up because they believe that they're ordained by God and as a result are above the law.
What I meant with the execution thing is that if law in a certain country permits that a child molester be executed, the child molester should be punished to the full extent of the law regardless of our feelings of contempt or forgiveness.
In other words, the church and state should always be separated.
I think this issue with the Catholics and child molesters could be solved internally if they really wanted too. I don't know how the Catholic Church is dealing with it, but from what I've read they seem to brush the issue away to the point of completely ignoring it. Why? Probably because they think that their priests being ordained by God cannot be persecuted by the law of man. Which makes me wonder about the law of the church. Obviously one would think that they view molestation as a sin. Perhaps even a cardinal sin.
The way I've always looked at the 'priest'...'preacher'....or even the 'pope'....is that the POSITION was ordained by God, not the man. The man can fall, make mistakes, screw up and all that and he needs to be responsible for his actions. But the position really is holy ground. Which speaks more for how the person holding the position should treat it than it does for anything else. Obviously if we go to a certain church we'll have a level of respect for the pastor. But I think we should be holding MORE respect for the position and the responsibility that the pastor has than we should for the person.
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