Catholic, Protestant.... doesn't matter. Wherever you have a religiously-affiliated organization claiming to care for orphans and children, it won't be long before their God-loving, Jesus-freaking "missionaries" begin sexually abusing children who are supposedly in their care.
Catholic priests get the worst possible reputation on this subject because of centuries of rape and sexual abuse of children that the Church covered up as long as it could. But if there is one redeeming factor in the predator Catholic priests’ case is that these “men of God” are not allowed to marry and so their libidinous tendencies remain repressed. Still, even a horny Catholic priest should find himself a woman in his parish who is willing to partake sexual favors with him. Raping children behind the altar cannot be excused with the “vow of chastity”. I am sure the vast majority of Catholic priests who “religiously” abide by their vow of chastity do in fact find solace by masturbating or engaging in homosexual sex in secret. In fact, social scientists have long argued that the chastity-bound Catholic organizations (priests, nuns, etc.) are attractive to closeted gays and pedophiles: They can “practice” under the protection of a powerful institution like the Catholic Church.
When it comes to the Protestants, it’s a Pandora’s box. Absent any authoritarian hierarchy, Protestants evolve in a free market of all kinds of religious bullshit, bigotry, for-profit megachurches a la American style, American colonial endeavors disguised as missionaries, and yes, sexual predation on children and women in the developing world where religious sentiment is still deeply entrenched and makes people credulous and easily targeted. The latest spate of scandals in protestant megachurches across the US, particularly in the backward state of Texas, is only the tip of the iceberg. But at least in the US, when these criminals are caught, there is some justice for their victims. But in the developing world, these neo-colonial missionaries very often escape punishment and many years can go by before someone says anything.
Two examples of missionary work becoming a conduit for sexually abusing children:
1- The Nobel Peace Prize-winning and East Timorese independence hero, Catholic Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, was found to have sexually abused dozens of young boys. Yet, his own parish, the men and women who are the parents of the raped children, continue to this day to defend “their” bishop. This goes to show how profoundly has religious barbarity brainwashed people into worshipping the rapist of their own children because he is a “man of God”. For those readers who are not familiar with East Timor: The country is a tiny tip of one island among the thousands of islands that make up Indonesia. Catholicism there was imposed by 400 years of “missionary” Portuguese colonialism, so Christianity isn’t even native to the people of Timor. Yet, the East Timorese are so brutally mentally enslaved by the indoctrination of a foreign imported religion that they continue to bow to the Catholic Church which is stronger than ever in East Timor. And Belo is not alone: other East Timor Catholic dignitaries have had their share of raping young girls and boys.
2- The Maronite Catholic Church is one of many religious
cults that make up the country of Lebanon where archbishops, bishops, priests,
mullahs, imams, sheikhs of all sorts, colors, and origins rule, each over his
own herd of brainless believers who hate all the other herds of brainless
believers. When Maronite Catholic priest Mansour Labaki, famous for his
religious songs and choirs made up of young boys and girls, was accused of
molesting and raping dozens of his choir children, the Maronite Church and the
Vatican initially defended him as the Church has done for decades with its
thousands of child-molesting priests. But then a French court investigated and sentenced him to
15 years in jail in absentia for two counts of rape and one count of sexual
assault against three girls, followed by the Vatican which initially sentenced
him to a “life of prayer and solitude in a monastery” without formally
defrocking him. And there were other Maronite priests who were accused of similar crimes, like Georges Badr.
The Vatican and the Maronite Church ultimately defrocked Labaki but refused to
hand him over to French justice. Mansour
Labaki s believed to be hiding in a monastery somewhere in Lebanon, after he was
stripped of his status as a priest in a decree signed by Pope Francis. It is unclear
if he will ever face justice, despite Interpol issuing an international arrest
warrant in 2016. At his trial, French prosecutors condemned Labaki's lack of
co-operation and alleged intimidation campaigns against witnesses. Labaki, who
rejects the rulings against him, has been accused by lawyers of abusing dozens
of people. His "faithful" followers continue to defend him, arguing like Trump that the accusations against him are just a witch hunt carried out by his family over an inheritance dispute.
Fundamentally, I think all "missionary" work in
the late 20th and early 21st century is a neo-colonial enterprise,
regardless of whether it is Muslim, Christian or any other of the thousands of criminal
and primitive cults (Jehovah’s witnesses, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, born-again
imbeciles, Evangelical criminals of the US, etc., not to mention the Islamic
creeps of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, the caliphate, and all the Pakistani- Saudi-, Emirati-, or Kuwaiti-funded
and inspired counter-missionaries targeting the West with mosques, madrassas
and terror). With military boots-on-the-ground colonialism having ended after
World War II, it has been replaced by commercial colonialism (principally the
US, but lately China as well) and religious colonialism. Somehow people don’t
see the ridicule in believing that one's own religious barbarity is the
"real" thing, the "true" religion, and is much better than
all other barbarian religious variations on earth, then use that sense of "supremacy"as a means to sexually abuse children of other nations.
Here is one recent instance of a scandal involving children
and religious clergy. Imagine the thousands of rapes and sexual assaults
perpetrated by religious people around the world that no one ever hears about.
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Christian organization plagued by allegations of child sex abuse faces another lawsuit
Elizabeth Chuck
Thu, May 1, 2025
Kayla McClain, in a current photo and one from her time growing up in Indonesia, alleges Ethnos360 failed to protect her.
A Florida-based Christian organization with a history of child sex abuse allegations against it has been hit with a lawsuit claiming one of its missionaries sexually assaulted a minor overseas 15 years ago.
Ethnos360, a nonprofit formerly known as New Tribes Mission, sends missionaries and their families throughout the globe. In 2019, multiple women told NBC News that they had been sexually abused decades earlier by their “dorm dads” — missionaries who were supposed to care for children at the mission’s boarding schools while their parents served in foreign countries.
The group settled several suits related to those allegations and issued a public apology to the abuse survivors following the 2019 NBC News report. It also said it had “incorporated significant child safety training” after an independent party commissioned by New Tribes Mission shared recommendations in 2010 amid the abuse allegations.
But Wednesday's lawsuit, filed in Circuit Court in Seminole County, Florida, says the group “failed to offer any care or professional assistance” to the family of an American child who came forward to report inappropriate sexual conduct in 2012, two years after those recommendations were issued.
The girl, Kayla McClain, is now 24, lives in Michigan and recently graduated from nursing school. NBC News does not normally identify alleged victims of sexual assault, but McClain opted to be identified by her full name in the legal filing.
“I’m tired of being quiet and tired of being invisible,” McClain said in her first public remarks about the case. “I just want people to know what really happened and that there’s actually a face and a name behind what’s going on.”
David Doyle, an attorney for Ethnos360, said the group “takes allegations of this nature very seriously” and “categorically denies any merit to allegations made against it.” McClain was around 5 years old in 2005 when she met her alleged abuser, Nate Horling, the lawsuit said. Like McClain and her family, Horling lived with his wife and children in housing in Indonesia provided by what was then New Tribes Mission. He had a child about McClain’s age whom McClain would play with, the legal complaint said, adding that the alleged abuse by Horling started with inappropriate touching while McClain was playing with his child. Afterward, Horling would allegedly tell McClain “he was sorry and instructed her not to tell anyone and blamed her for what occurred,” the lawsuit said.
The abuse escalated after both families relocated to a different part of Indonesia in 2009, where Horling later allegedly sexually assaulted McClain in a closet, according to the lawsuit. Horling, who is not named as a defendant, told NBC News in an email that he “absolutely” denies all allegations.
The lawsuit comes less than a year after another legal filing against Ethnos360, which alleged the group failed to protect a girl from repeated sexual misconduct by a peer at its missionary training center in Missouri in 2016 and failed to adequately investigate the abuse allegations.
That lawsuit is ongoing, though Ethnos360 has filed a motion to dismiss it, arguing in court documents that because the alleged abuse occurred in private residences on Ethnos360 property, not while children were under Ethnos360 staff supervision, the group did not have “any right and /or duty to control, occupy, or monitor the families and activities within the residences.”
Boz Tchividjian, the attorney who filed last year’s lawsuit as well as Wednesday’s, said Ethnos360 needs to examine why it has faced so many allegations of inappropriate behavior. “It’s not in a vacuum. This is over, and over, and over again,” said Tchividjian, who was the founder and former executive director of Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or GRACE, the group hired to make the 2010 recommendations on handling abuse to Ethnos360 when it was called New Tribes Mission. He is no longer part of GRACE.
Wednesday’s lawsuit said the GRACE report outlined multiple instances of sexual abuse within Ethnos360 and accused the organization’s leadership of failing to properly respond to child sexual abuse allegations. On its website, Ethnos360 acknowledges past missteps and has a section dedicated to child safety, in which it says it has safeguards to protect kids, including background checks for anyone applying for Ethnos360 membership and specialized training for all new members.
Yet the lawsuit claims that when McClain’s family contacted Ethnos360’s child safety leadership team in Indonesia, there was limited response. McClain said her father had reached out to the child safety team in 2012 after she disclosed to her parents that she was engaging in sexual conduct with other children — a behavior that can be an indicator of a child being abused by an adult. The lawsuit said that several members spoke with her parents in the months that followed but did not open an investigation into the sexualized behavior. It also said Ethnos360 did not offer any care or help to McClain or the other minors and acted as if the conduct “was typical sexual exploration between children.”
McClain said it was not until years later that her parents found out she had been sexually abused by an adult. Her attorney said that, at that time, her emotional state was too fragile to consider filing charges. “The child safety team never talked to me. I really needed someone who was trained to and knew how to talk to a kid in this situation, because I didn’t know how to share what had happened,” McClain said.
McClain started struggling profoundly with her mental health in 2018 once she and her family returned to the United States from Indonesia, the lawsuit said, adding that she had flashbacks of her alleged abuse and attempted to take her own life in 2019. After undergoing treatment, she decided to report her experience to Ethnos360 in 2021 through IHART, a review team commissioned by Ethnos360 to investigate claims of abuse, according to the lawsuit. After several hours-long interviews, Ethnos360 allegedly offered no counseling to McClain and did not report the allegations to child protection agencies, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit accuses Ethnos360 of negligence in failing to protect McClain from abuse and failing to provide adequate training to its employees to identify and report child abuse. It seeks unspecified damages and a jury trial. McClain said her experience has caused her to have post-traumatic stress disorder and has made her question her view of God. “The abuse that happened was horrible, but what has really affected me is the response from Ethnos and the child safety team and IHART,” she said. “They need to be held accountable. I want the silence to stop.”
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