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Thread: Molesters & abusers-why have the baptist joined the catholic clergy??

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    Werewolf Molesters & abusers-why have the baptist joined the catholic clergy??



    By Nicole Hensley Updated 4:52 pm CDT, Saturday, June 15, 2019

    8

    Former Grace Family Baptist Church pastor Stephen Bratton, 43, was arrested Friday and charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child. Photo: Harris County Sheriff's Office

    Photo: Harris County Sheriff's Office
    Image 1 of 23
    Former Grace Family Baptist Church pastor Stephen Bratton, 43, was arrested Friday and charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child.

    The former pastor of a Southern Baptist church in north Harris County has been arrested in connection with an allegation that he molested a teenage relative for about two years, court records show.

    Stephen Bratton, who stepped down from the Grace Family Baptist Church in Cypress Station last month, has since been released from custody at the Harris County Jail after posting a $50,000 bond.

    The investigation began on May 16 after Bratton allegedly confessed to three Southern Baptist clergy members that he abused the child, according to court documents. Two of Bratton's co-pastors, Aaron Wright and Erin Frye, called the Harris County Sheriff's Office to their church on Bammel Westfield Road to take a report that same day, while the third pastor, David Shiflet, said he referred the complaint to the Department of Family Protective Services.

    Bratton, 43, was charged Friday with continuous sexual abuse of a child, Senior Deputy Thomas Gilliland said Saturday.
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    "As the weeks followed the pastors continued to make contact with the detective because they desired the case to be brought forward so that justice would be served," Wright said in a written statement. "Once the case began we continued to cooperate fully throughout the investigation."

    Bratton is accused of abusing the child from 2013 to 2015 with inappropriate touching that escalated to "sexual intercourse multiple times a day or several times a week," Gilliland said.

    There are no other known victims, according to church leaders.

    Court records show an emergency protection order was granted.

    A LinkedIn profile shows Bratton listed himself as unemployed after leaving the Grace Family Baptist Church on Bammel Westfield Road in May. He previously worked at the Old River Baptist Church in Dayton.

    [The Southern Baptist Convention declined to keep a list of key church officials and volunteers convicted of sex abuse crimes. We did.]

    Bratton most recently testified in support of failed House Bill 896 that would have abolished abortions in Texas and opened up the possibility that prosecutors could charge a woman who undergoes the procedure with criminal homicide. The offense can be punishable by the death penalty under current Texas law.

    "Whoever authorizes or commits murder is guilty," Bratton said in an April 8 hearing. "They're guilty already in a court that is far more weighty than what is here in Texas."

    He is married with seven children.

    The charges follow this week's Southern Baptist Convention annual gathering in Birmingham, Alabama, where religious leaders called for churches to toughen screening processes of pastors and ensure the treatment of sex abuse survivors.

    An investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio-Express News found more than 700 people -- mostly children -- had been victimized by hundreds of Southern Baptist church leaders since 1998.
    "There is no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility. His supporters stormed the Capitol because of the unhinged falsehoods he shouted into the world’s largest megaphone," McConnell wrote. "His behavior during and after the chaos was also unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended."



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    In the decade since Vasquez's appeal for help, more than 250 people who worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches have been charged with sex crimes, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News reveals.

    It's not just a recent problem: In all, since 1998, roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the newspapers found. That includes those who were convicted, credibly accused and successfully sued, and those who confessed or resigned. More of them worked in Texas than in any other state.


    They left behind more than 700 victims, many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions.

    About 220 offenders have been convicted or took plea deals, and dozens of cases are pending. They were pastors. Ministers. Youth pastors. Sunday school teachers. Deacons. Church volunteers.

    Nearly 100 are still held in prisons stretching from Sacramento County, Calif., to Hillsborough County, Fla., state and federal records show. Scores of others cut deals and served no time. More than 100 are registered sex offenders. Some still work in Southern Baptist churches today.

    Journalists in the two newsrooms spent more than six months reviewing thousands of pages of court, prison and police records and conducting hundreds of interviews. They built a database of former leaders in Southern Baptist churches who have been convicted of sex crimes.

    The investigation reveals that:

    • At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades. In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.

    • Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints within their own churches or seminaries.

    • Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit. Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc.

    • Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors. Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors' studies and Sunday school classrooms. A few were adults — women and men who sought pastoral guidance and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.


    Heather Schneider was 14 when she was molested in a choir room at Houston's Second Baptist Church, according to criminal and civil court records. Her mother, Gwen Casados, said church leaders waited months to fire the attacker, who later pleaded no contest. In response to her lawsuit, church leaders also denied responsibility.

    Schneider slit her wrists the day after that attack in 1994, Casados said. She survived, but she died 14 years later from a drug overdose that her mother blames on the trauma.

    "I never got her back," Casados said.

    Others took decades to come forward, and only after their lives had unraveled. David Pittman was 12, he says, when a youth minister from his Georgia church first molested him in 1981. Two other former members of the man's churches said in interviews that they also were abused by him. But by the time Pittman spoke out in 2006, it was too late to press criminal charges.

    The minister still works at an SBC church.

    Pittman won't soon forgive those who have offered prayers but taken no action. He only recently stopped hating God.

    "That is the greatest tragedy of all," he said. "So many people's faith is murdered. I mean, their faith is slaughtered by these predators."

    August "Augie" Boto, interim president of the SBC's Executive Committee, helped draft the rejection of reform proposals in 2008. In an interview, he expressed "sorrow" about some of the newspapers' findings but said the convention's leadership can do only so much to stop sexual abuses.

    "It would be sorrow if it were 200 or 600" cases, Boto said. "Sorrow. What we're talking about is criminal. The fact that criminal activity occurs in a church context is always the basis of grief. But it's going to happen. And that statement does not mean that we must be resigned to it."

    'A porous sieve'
    At the core of Southern Baptist doctrine is local church autonomy, the idea that each church is independent and self-governing. It's one of the main reasons that Boto said most of the proposals a decade ago were viewed as flawed by the executive committee because the committee doesn't have the authority to force churches to report sexual abuse to a central registry.

    Because of that, Boto said, the committee "realized that lifting up a model that could not be enforced was an exercise in futility," and so instead drafted a report that "accepted the existence of the problem rather than attempting to define its magnitude."

    Q&A: Investigation into sexual abuse 'shining the light of day upon crime,' Southern Baptist leader says

    SBC churches and organizations share resources and materials, and together they fund missionary trips and seminaries. Most pastors are ordained locally after they've convinced a small group of church elders that they've been called to service by God. There is no central database that tracks ordinations, or sexual abuse convictions or allegations.

    All of that makes Southern Baptist churches highly susceptible to predators, says Christa Brown, an activist who wrote a book about being molested as a child by a pastor at her SBC church in Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb.

    "It's a perfect profession for a con artist, because all he has to do is talk a good talk and convince people that he's been called by God, and bingo, he gets to be a Southern Baptist minister," said Brown, who lives in Colorado. "Then he can infiltrate the entirety of the SBC, move from church to church, from state to state, go to bigger churches and more prominent churches where he has more influence and power, and it all starts in some small church.

    "It's a porous sieve of a denomination."

    To try to measure the problem, the newspapers collected and cross-checked news reports, prison records, court records, sex offender registries and other documents. Reporters also conducted hundreds of interviews with victims, church leaders, investigators and offenders.

    ‘So many people’s faith is murdered. I mean, their faith is slaughtered by these predators.’

    David Pittman, who says he was molested by his youth minister

    Several factors make it likely that the abuse is even more widespread than can be documented: Victims of sexual assault come forward at a low rate; many cases in churches are handled internally; and many Southern Baptist churches are in rural communities where media coverage is sparse.

    It's clear, however, that SBC leaders have long been aware of the problem. Bowing to pressure from activists, the Baptist General Convention of Texas, one of the largest SBC state organizations, in 2007 published a list of eight sex offenders who had served in Southern Baptist churches in Texas.

    EXPLAINER: What is the Southern Baptist Convention?

    Around the same time, the Rev. Thomas Doyle wrote to SBC leaders, imploring them to act. A priest and former high-ranking lawyer for the Catholic Church, Doyle in the 1980s was one of the earliest to blow the whistle on child sexual abuse in the church. But Catholic leaders "lied about it ... covered it up and ignored the victims," said Doyle, now retired and living in northern Virginia.

    Doyle turned to activism because of his experiences, work that brought him closer to those abused in Southern Baptist churches. Their stories — and how the SBC handled them — felt hauntingly familiar, he said.

    "I saw the same type of behavior going on with the Southern Baptists," he said.

    The responses were predictable, Doyle said. In one, Frank Page, then the SBC president, wrote that they were "taking this issue seriously" but that local church autonomy presented "serious limitations." In March, Page resigned as president and CEO of the SBC's Executive Committee for "a morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past," according to the executive committee.

    Details have not been disclosed, but SBC officials said they had "no reason to suspect any legal impropriety." Page declined to be interviewed.

    Other leaders have acknowledged that Baptist churches are troubled by predators but that they could not interfere in local church affairs. Even so, the SBC has ended its affiliation with at least four churches in the past 10 years for affirming or endorsing homosexual behavior. The SBC governing documents ban gay or female pastors, but they do not outlaw convicted sex offenders from working in churches.

    In one email to Debbie Vasquez, Augie Boto assured her that "no Baptist I know of is pretending that 'the problem does not exist.'"

    "There is no question that some Southern Baptist ministers have done criminal things, including sexual abuse of children," he wrote in a May 2007 email. "It is a sad and tragic truth. Hopefully, the harm emanating from such occurrences will cause the local churches to be more aggressively vigilant."
    "There is no question former President Trump bears moral responsibility. His supporters stormed the Capitol because of the unhinged falsehoods he shouted into the world’s largest megaphone," McConnell wrote. "His behavior during and after the chaos was also unconscionable, from attacking Vice President Mike Pence during the riot to praising the criminals after it ended."



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    Quote Originally Posted by Bill View Post
    In the decade since Vasquez's appeal for help, more than 250 people who worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches have been charged with sex crimes, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News reveals.

    It's not just a recent problem: In all, since 1998, roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the newspapers found. That includes those who were convicted, credibly accused and successfully sued, and those who confessed or resigned. More of them worked in Texas than in any other state.


    They left behind more than 700 victims, many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions.

    About 220 offenders have been convicted or took plea deals, and dozens of cases are pending. They were pastors. Ministers. Youth pastors. Sunday school teachers. Deacons. Church volunteers.

    Nearly 100 are still held in prisons stretching from Sacramento County, Calif., to Hillsborough County, Fla., state and federal records show. Scores of others cut deals and served no time. More than 100 are registered sex offenders. Some still work in Southern Baptist churches today.

    Journalists in the two newsrooms spent more than six months reviewing thousands of pages of court, prison and police records and conducting hundreds of interviews. They built a database of former leaders in Southern Baptist churches who have been convicted of sex crimes.

    The investigation reveals that:

    • At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades. In some cases, church leaders apparently failed to alert law enforcement about complaints or to warn other congregations about allegations of misconduct.

    • Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by victims for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints within their own churches or seminaries.

    • Some registered sex offenders returned to the pulpit. Others remain there, including a Houston preacher who sexually assaulted a teenager and now is the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations, federal records show. Its name: Touching the Future Today Inc.

    • Many of the victims were adolescents who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors. Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors' studies and Sunday school classrooms. A few were adults — women and men who sought pastoral guidance and instead say they were seduced or sexually assaulted.


    Heather Schneider was 14 when she was molested in a choir room at Houston's Second Baptist Church, according to criminal and civil court records. Her mother, Gwen Casados, said church leaders waited months to fire the attacker, who later pleaded no contest. In response to her lawsuit, church leaders also denied responsibility.

    Schneider slit her wrists the day after that attack in 1994, Casados said. She survived, but she died 14 years later from a drug overdose that her mother blames on the trauma.

    "I never got her back," Casados said.

    Others took decades to come forward, and only after their lives had unraveled. David Pittman was 12, he says, when a youth minister from his Georgia church first molested him in 1981. Two other former members of the man's churches said in interviews that they also were abused by him. But by the time Pittman spoke out in 2006, it was too late to press criminal charges.

    The minister still works at an SBC church.

    Pittman won't soon forgive those who have offered prayers but taken no action. He only recently stopped hating God.

    "That is the greatest tragedy of all," he said. "So many people's faith is murdered. I mean, their faith is slaughtered by these predators."

    August "Augie" Boto, interim president of the SBC's Executive Committee, helped draft the rejection of reform proposals in 2008. In an interview, he expressed "sorrow" about some of the newspapers' findings but said the convention's leadership can do only so much to stop sexual abuses.

    "It would be sorrow if it were 200 or 600" cases, Boto said. "Sorrow. What we're talking about is criminal. The fact that criminal activity occurs in a church context is always the basis of grief. But it's going to happen. And that statement does not mean that we must be resigned to it."

    'A porous sieve'
    At the core of Southern Baptist doctrine is local church autonomy, the idea that each church is independent and self-governing. It's one of the main reasons that Boto said most of the proposals a decade ago were viewed as flawed by the executive committee because the committee doesn't have the authority to force churches to report sexual abuse to a central registry.

    Because of that, Boto said, the committee "realized that lifting up a model that could not be enforced was an exercise in futility," and so instead drafted a report that "accepted the existence of the problem rather than attempting to define its magnitude."

    Q&A: Investigation into sexual abuse 'shining the light of day upon crime,' Southern Baptist leader says

    SBC churches and organizations share resources and materials, and together they fund missionary trips and seminaries. Most pastors are ordained locally after they've convinced a small group of church elders that they've been called to service by God. There is no central database that tracks ordinations, or sexual abuse convictions or allegations.

    All of that makes Southern Baptist churches highly susceptible to predators, says Christa Brown, an activist who wrote a book about being molested as a child by a pastor at her SBC church in Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb.

    "It's a perfect profession for a con artist, because all he has to do is talk a good talk and convince people that he's been called by God, and bingo, he gets to be a Southern Baptist minister," said Brown, who lives in Colorado. "Then he can infiltrate the entirety of the SBC, move from church to church, from state to state, go to bigger churches and more prominent churches where he has more influence and power, and it all starts in some small church.

    "It's a porous sieve of a denomination."

    To try to measure the problem, the newspapers collected and cross-checked news reports, prison records, court records, sex offender registries and other documents. Reporters also conducted hundreds of interviews with victims, church leaders, investigators and offenders.

    ‘So many people’s faith is murdered. I mean, their faith is slaughtered by these predators.’

    David Pittman, who says he was molested by his youth minister

    Several factors make it likely that the abuse is even more widespread than can be documented: Victims of sexual assault come forward at a low rate; many cases in churches are handled internally; and many Southern Baptist churches are in rural communities where media coverage is sparse.

    It's clear, however, that SBC leaders have long been aware of the problem. Bowing to pressure from activists, the Baptist General Convention of Texas, one of the largest SBC state organizations, in 2007 published a list of eight sex offenders who had served in Southern Baptist churches in Texas.

    EXPLAINER: What is the Southern Baptist Convention?

    Around the same time, the Rev. Thomas Doyle wrote to SBC leaders, imploring them to act. A priest and former high-ranking lawyer for the Catholic Church, Doyle in the 1980s was one of the earliest to blow the whistle on child sexual abuse in the church. But Catholic leaders "lied about it ... covered it up and ignored the victims," said Doyle, now retired and living in northern Virginia.

    Doyle turned to activism because of his experiences, work that brought him closer to those abused in Southern Baptist churches. Their stories — and how the SBC handled them — felt hauntingly familiar, he said.

    "I saw the same type of behavior going on with the Southern Baptists," he said.

    The responses were predictable, Doyle said. In one, Frank Page, then the SBC president, wrote that they were "taking this issue seriously" but that local church autonomy presented "serious limitations." In March, Page resigned as president and CEO of the SBC's Executive Committee for "a morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past," according to the executive committee.

    Details have not been disclosed, but SBC officials said they had "no reason to suspect any legal impropriety." Page declined to be interviewed.

    Other leaders have acknowledged that Baptist churches are troubled by predators but that they could not interfere in local church affairs. Even so, the SBC has ended its affiliation with at least four churches in the past 10 years for affirming or endorsing homosexual behavior. The SBC governing documents ban gay or female pastors, but they do not outlaw convicted sex offenders from working in churches.

    In one email to Debbie Vasquez, Augie Boto assured her that "no Baptist I know of is pretending that 'the problem does not exist.'"

    "There is no question that some Southern Baptist ministers have done criminal things, including sexual abuse of children," he wrote in a May 2007 email. "It is a sad and tragic truth. Hopefully, the harm emanating from such occurrences will cause the local churches to be more aggressively vigilant."
    Religion itself is a con game.

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