Okay, so this may have been discussed in former threads, but I had a question. I just watched the movie "Spotlight" last night. By the way, AWESOME movie, and I recommend anybody and everybody watch it. For those who don't know, it deals with the Boston Globe's investigative team that broke the story of the Catholic Archdiocese in Boston and the cover up of several years of child molestation, rape, and abuse.

As I was watching this, and having experience on this board for years, both as a poster and reader, I can remember several stories of people posting about abuse by a church leader and that leader getting the minimum punishment legally and in the church.

My question is this: Has anybody ever tried to do this type of expose on the Mormon church? It's settling of abuse cases? It's involvement with the Lamanite placement program and the abuses there? The pushing of young girls to give up their babies to LDS Social Services? The abusive treatment of gays, etc? More than anything, are there public records of these abuses in the courts? If it has been done, where can I read it??

There are two things that make the molestation charges within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints different from the charges within the Roman Catholic church. One is the lack of LDS church accountability for who is, and who isn't, in the Mormon priesthood. In the Roman Catholic church, not all males are considered priests; those that become priests have to go through various professional trainings with a legal document proclaiming them to be priests in this or that order after the training is done. This is different from the LDS church where every LDS male over the age of twelve years old is considered to be part of the LDS priestly class, and they remain in that class until the church decides to kick them out. There is little training involved, people in the Mormon priesthoods do not get paid for their services (save the GAs and above), and there are no legal documents indicating that a specific male member has become part of the Mormon priesthood.

The other (and probably more important) difference between the Roman Catholic and LDS churches on this issue is media ownership and control. While the Roman church owns some liturgical magazines and noncommercial radio and TV stations in the U.S., it does not own any big-name media outlets like the Boston Globe. This lack of ownership and control of the Boston Globe allows the newspaper's reporters an incredible amount of flexibility when writing stories about the Roman Catholic church, even though Roman Catholicism is the largest religion in the Boston area.

Contrast that with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints which owns the top commercial media, including the top newspapers, in the Salt Lake City market. Any reporter who dared to write for the Deseret News what the group of reporters wrote for the Boston Globe about the Catholic Church would most likely get pulled from any reports he/she was doing on the LDS church long before the story would ever see even a printer.

blindguy Wrote:
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> In the Roman
> Catholic church, not all males are considered
> priests; those that become priests have to go
> through various professional trainings with a
> legal document proclaiming them to be priests in
> this or that order after the training is done.

Just a clarification: while catholic priests usually do get documents declaring them priests in a certain order, those documents aren't any kind of "legal" document. They're religious titles. They aren't any kind of legal status -- in the US at least. It's not like a medical license, or a license to practice law after passing the bar exam -- they're solely religious documents. And they're not *required* in the Roman Catholic church, either (though they're the norm).