There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns, and other members of religious life in the Catholic Church. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the cases have involved many allegations, investigations, trials, convictions, acknowledgement and apologies by Church authorities, and revelations about decades of instances of abuse and attempts by Church officials to cover them up. The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. Criminal cases for the most part do not cover sexual harassment of adults. The accusations of abuse and cover-ups began to receive public attention during the late 1980s. Many of these cases allege decades of abuse, frequently made by adults or older youths years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes, where abuse continued.
Independent Baptist churches are Christian congregations, generally holding to conservative Baptist beliefs. Although some Independent Baptist churches refuse affiliation with Baptist denominations, various Independent Baptist Church denominations have been founded.
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a religious sect of the fundamentalist Mormon denominations whose members practice polygamy. It is variously defined as a cult, a sect, or a new religious movement.
Warren Steed Jeffs is an American religious-cult leader and felon, convicted of several sex crimes and two assisted sex crimes involving children. He is the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamous cult. In 2011, he was convicted of two felony counts of child sexual assault, for which he is serving a life sentence.
Daniel Peter Masterson is an American actor. He played Steven Hyde in That '70s Show (1998–2006), Milo Foster in Men at Work (2012–2014) and Jameson "Rooster" Bennett in The Ranch (2016–2018). In May 2023, Masterson was convicted of raping two women in 2003, while charges from a third woman resulted in a hung jury. In September 2023, he was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. Masterson is a Scientologist, as were his victims at the time of the assaults. The Church of Scientology's attempts to silence the victims and subsequent interference resulted in a 20-year delay in bringing the crimes to justice.
Jack Frasure Hyles was a leading figure in the Independent Baptist movement, having pastored the First Baptist Church of Hammond in Hammond, Indiana, from August 1959 until his death. He was well known for being an innovator of the church bus ministry that brought thousands of people each week from surrounding towns to Hammond for services. Hyles built First Baptist up from fewer than a thousand members to a membership of 100,000. In 1993 and again in 1994, it was reported that 20,000 people attended First Baptist every Sunday, making it the most attended Baptist church in the United States. In 2001, at the time of Hyles's death, 20,000 people were attending church services and Sunday school each week.
The First Baptist Church of Hammond is a fundamentalist Independent Baptist megachurch in Hammond, Indiana, a suburb of Chicago. It is the largest church in the state of Indiana, and in 2007 was the 20th largest in the United States. Though founded in 1887 by Allen Hill, it was under Jack Hyles' leadership from 1959–2001 when it became one of the megachurches in the United States and during the 1970s had the highest Sunday school attendance of any church in the world. In 1990, the church had a weekly attendance of 20,000. It also operates Hyles-Anderson College, a non-accredited institution established for the training of pastors and missionaries, and two K-12 schools, called City Baptist Schools and Hammond Baptist Schools. John Wilkerson is the senior pastor at First Baptist Church.
Hyles–Anderson College (HAC) is a private independent Baptist college in unincorporated Crown Point, Lake County, Indiana. As a ministry of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, it focuses on training pastors, missionaries and Christian teachers to work in Independent Baptist schools.
L. Paige Patterson served as the fifth president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., from 1992 to 2003, as president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) from 1998 to 2000, and as the eighth president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, from 2003 until his firing in 2018. He played a major role in the Southern Baptist "conservative resurgence", called "Fundamentalist Takeover" by opponents. He has been alternately described as a fundamentalist and a conservative evangelical.
Preying from the Pulpit was a mini-news series produced in May 1993 by WJBK of Detroit, Michigan, for the 11:00 pm news. The news report argued that sexual abuse in seven different churches around the United States were all connected to First Baptist Church of Hammond and its Pastor, Jack Hyles. Hyles called the program "poor journalism" and organized a national campaign to respond.
Sexual abuse or sex abuse, also referred to as molestation, is abusive sexual behavior by one person upon another. It is often perpetrated using force or by taking advantage of another. Molestation often refers to an instance of sexual assault against a small child, whereas sexual abuse is a term used for a persistent pattern of sexual assaults.
This page documents Catholic Church sexual abuse cases by country.
Richard Frank Stika is an American prelate of the Catholic Church who served as the third bishop of the Diocese of Knoxville in Tennessee from 2009.
The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Europe has affected several dioceses in European nations. Italy is an exceptional case as the 1929 Lateran Treaty gave the Vatican legal autonomy from Italy, giving the clergy recourse to Vatican rather than Italian law.
Gerald Francis Ridsdale is an Australian laicised Catholic priest and sex offender. He was convicted between 1993 and 2017 of a large number of child sexual abuse and indecent assault charges against 65 children aged as young as four years. The offences occurred from the 1960s to the 1980s while Ridsdale worked as a school chaplain at St Alipius Primary School, a boys' boarding school in the Victorian regional city of Ballarat.
The Trinity Baptist Church sex scandal was a United States sex scandal that came to national attention in 2011. The scandal centered on the way that Trinity Baptist Church, an Independent Baptist church in Concord, New Hampshire, and its former pastor handled the 1997 rape and subsequent pregnancy of one of its members, an underage girl, by her employer. The employer was another member of the congregation who hired the girl as a babysitter for his children.
Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom has been reported in the country throughout its history. In about 90% of cases the abuser is a person known to the child. However, cases during the second half of the twentieth century, involving religious institutions, schools, popular entertainers, politicians, military personnel, and other officials, have been revealed and widely publicised since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Child sexual abuse rings in numerous towns and cities across the UK have also drawn considerable attention.
Sharon Liese is an American producer, director, and screenwriter. She created the true crime series Pink Collar Crimes and developed the show with Jon Kroll at CBS Studios. They planned to shop it out to various networks; however, CBS purchased the rights prior to any pitch being made.
Widespread sexual abuse cases in Southern Baptist churches were reported by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News on February 10, 2019. The report found roughly 380 clergy, lay leaders and volunteers had faced allegations of sexual misconduct, leaving behind over 700 victims since 1998. The extent of misconduct is further complicated by work within the Southern Baptist Convention to move sex offenders to other communities and resist attempts to address the culture of abuse.
Circle of Hope Girls' Ranch was a reformatory boarding school located in Humansville, Missouri. The school opened in July 2006 and was closed in 2020 amid reports and lawsuits filed by former students alleging child abuse, as well as due to an investigation conducted by the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
