#Clergylivesmatter

It's an old, sad, pattern. Allegations of abuse inside a church's walls begin. People are ostracized, members driven away by the old guard circling the wagons. Counter attacks fly. Character assassination of the accusers spreads through the rumor mill like wildfire, all working to discount the credibility of the victims. People insist that they will withhold justice until they have heard both sides, all the while ignoring the fact that only one side is speaking publicly.

We spent huge amounts of time in school examining these patterns, learning the ways to predict them and subvert them before the call for fair judgement became complicity in abuse. Barring our oldest clergy, I doubt a single pulpit thumper like myself got through school without studying it somewhat, and younger clergy spent significant time with it.

But we still see it. It's rare, but it's there, and every time it comes to the same thing. Abuse is about power, and power gropers in the church always tend to follow the same lines. And there is always someone there to defend them in the name of "fairness," or to protect the reputation of the institution.

Frankly, I think it's time we toss out the reputation of all our institutions. They do more harm then good.

So when I see similar patterns emerging elsewhere... I find them very hard to ignore.

In the same way that a great number of clergy do what we do because we want to do good, a great number of police are the same way. But the power seekers are there, and the thing about power seekers is that they seek power. They establish themselves deep into the bones of the organization, until it becomes a layer of protection around them that the folks just trying to do their job don't get.

In the church, when an abuser comes to light, a lot of people who don't condone the abuse still try to hide it, again for reputation's sake. But in the end, that doesn't work, because the abuser isn't just going to stop. Why would they, having been caught and then PROTECTED? Power is their drug and they WILL pursue it, until like any addict, they go too far, and then when it is impossible to hide, the reputation that would have been tarnished is instead destroyed. You still can't talk about priests in social circles without people bringing up rape and pedophilia. How many generations of good priests will it take to clear that shame? Five? Six? Will it ever be cleared?

We don't know, because it hasn't happened yet.

I've spoken to many people, some of them police officers, about the rise in police violence awareness. They protest groups like Black Lives Matter in the name of preserving the reputations, and raise hashtags like #bluelivesmatter in order to protest the backlash against peace officers. But here is the thing... you can't protect good cops if you are protecting bad cops.

Again, look to the church, at all those hard working priests have been tarnished, forever, by the actions of a tiny minority. What if the Church had responded, owning it's abusers and removing them so that the world could see that the safety of parishoners was more important than the church's reputation? We failed to get that right, and I don't know how long we'll pay the price.

The public opinion on police is turning, but it might not be too late for the Cops of the United States to do the right thing, removing their abusers from power and showing that the safety of citizens is more important than the reputation of the fraternity.

But so far, it hasn't happened. So far, all I see are wagons circling and the fraternity looking to its reputation, rather than the safety of the people.

And it feels depressingly familiar.