Thread by @bethanyshondark

When they lose their innocence, they often lose their faith along with it.
Read more: forward.com/opinion/408419…

Religious leaders (catholic and jewish and everyone else) stick to lawyer talk after scandals. In a bid to save themselves.

But when we see religious leaders acting like lawyers and PR flacks, it empties the pews. It saps our faith.

If you want your faith to survive &thrive, if you want it to have moral authority, act like the higher authority is God, not your law firm.

I understand the fear of speaking freely about the horror, the mistakes made. You’re afraid you’ll be sued out of existence.

But if you’re not acting Godly, your destruction is already guaranteed. Nobody wants to listen to you preach or raise their kids in it.

Even when people still feel an emotional and spiritual connection to a faith tradition, when sexual abuse is put into the mix, that's often not enough. If you don't feel safe sending your kid to Sunday school, if you're nervous about letting them out of your sight at services...

For most parents, especially those with large families, that is not a tenable situation. You can't feel like you have to keep your eyes on your kids 24/7, that you can't send them to Catholic or Jewish day school (for example), or for after school tutoring; & remain in the faith.

You *need* to know your kids will be safe. And when your religious leadership reacts to these revelations with double-talk PR legalese bullshit, you have no assurance that's the case.

The statistics in the Jewish and Catholic world are clear: those touched by sexual abuse, even second-hand, become fractured from their faith. A lot of that is practical self-preservation. You now realize your faith leaders treat your house of worship as a hunting ground.

I write a great deal about sex abuse in the Jewish community, and was once asked advice by a religious leader - a biggun - about protocols he should enact. They were motivated by his fear of a lawsuit, not his fear of God. He said so explicitly.

He basically said "I want to have protocols in place so that if there is abuse, I'm not sued." When I suggested avenues to become aware of abuse, his lawyer advised he should know as little about abuse as possible, to ensure he wasn't then liable for reporting it. I shit you not.

In a world in which this religious leader was a RELIGIOUS LEADER he would have told his lawyer "if someone in my flock is abused, I must know, I would put a stop to it, I would report it immediately." Instead, he yielded to his counsel.

The Jewish community has PROBLEMS (follow @GuilaBen - an expert). And it appears as unwilling to deal with them as the Catholic community. The problems appear to be worse among Catholics, but if you think your community doesn't have predators, you're willfully blind.

The difference between Catholics and Jews is while the PR lawyer double speak is prevalent in both, there are a lot more protocols and procedures in place in the Catholic world after lawsuits almost bankrupted entire branches of the system.

Catholics came to understand they had to have a game plan when abuse was reported, they had to have a strong and standard response. Which is why the VAST majority of the abuses in the PA grand jury report were from before the suits were filed.

The lawsuits motivated the Church to take the abuses seriously. The lawsuits almost bankrupted the Catholic Church. And they saved them. If the abuses had continued at the pace they were at, it wouldn't exist in America anymore.

There's a few things I've written over the years that I've reconsidered, perhaps no piece more than this: blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-you-wont-s…

I don't happen to like the actual suit that ended up getting filed, I don't think the synagogue should have been named; they didn't have much information and they acted extremely proactively when suspicious behavior was reported. But suits should have been filed.

The only way the Jewish community is going to start taking this issue seriously is if the fear of God is put in them. And unfortunately, we've seen that the fear of God only comes when faced with a massive lawsuit.

My advice for those who come to me with tales of abuse is now this: Sue. Sue them for every penny you can. You'll face an enormous amount of pressure not to.

But you may end up saving other children from abuse, you may save the faith of people down the road.