The ongoing saga of sexual abuse by Catholic priests plummets deeper today as documents are released showing years of abuse and denial by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nations largest Roman Catholic diocese. Tell men they cannot marry (or allow homosexuals in as priests), teach a system of salvation that says grace must be achieved before it is given and grace must be regularly earned to be maintained and surround yourself with an ecclesiology that hides behind ecclesiastically infallibility, and you have the perfect mixture to bake up the kind of scandal that currently exists in Catholicism. It is a system that is sure to make one feel spiritual but fails to actually change the heart – thus the evidence of which we now read.

Not that similar situations do not happen in protestant churches, especially the kind that care little for spiritual fruit as the indicator of conversion (not as the means to achieve). Protestants have their own moral black eyes due to their own theological aberrations such as the weekly push for quick profession-of-faith prayers, thus populating congregations with unconverted people, the exaltation of pastors as celebrity personalities, the redefinition of corporate church life in terms of popular opinion, pragmatism and moralism, rather than a careful and humble submission the sole authority of Scripture.

Catholics and many aberrant protestant groups have much in common in their theology that creates a climate for such cases as described in the NY Times. May God be gracious to us to provide a genuine reformation in the hearts of people to adhere to the sole authority of Scripture that produces a singular passion for the glory of Christ, rather than creating our religion from the passions of depraved human hearts.