The Clerical Class

Clerics Run Amuck

Religious institutions, for centuries, have claimed to be the custodians of morality, spiritual guidance, and divine truth. Yet, when we peer behind the gilded curtains of their sanctimonious facades, what often emerges is not divine light but the shadowy mechanics of power, exploitation, and control. Clericalism—the elevation of religious leaders to a status beyond reproach—has fostered systemic corruption in some of the world's most venerated spiritual traditions.

From the haunting legacy of child abuse within the Catholic Church, where victims' voices were silenced for decades by hierarchies more concerned with protecting their image than with justice, to the hypocrisy of the Church of England, which was recently revealed to have quietly swept financial and sexual misconduct under the rug for decades under its Primate Justin Welby, despite all of his social justice grandstanding and his $1B reparative justice initiative. Even the gilded high lamas of Tibetan plateau, often romanticized by the likes Richard Gere has not been immune, with allegations of abuse by prominent teachers and high sum hush money settlements rocking the faith of countless boomer neo-convert practitioners. These scandals lay bare a painful truth: the machinery of clericalism enables abuses of power and shields predators from accountability.

Justin Welby recently resigned from his post as Arch Bishop of Canterbury following the release of the Makin Report on 7 Nov 2024

The abuse scandals within the Catholic Church and the Church of England expose a shared, systemic failure rooted in clericalism and institutional self-preservation. In the Catholic Church, cases like those in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, where over 300 priests abused more than 1,000 victims over decades, and the rise and fall of Theodore McCarrick—a former cardinal accused of sexually abusing seminarians and minors—reveal a hierarchy more invested in protecting its reputation than its flock. Serial abusers were, for decades, kept out of the reach of law enforcement, and cycled through various parishes, and cloisters. While these failures of the Catholic Church are well known and documented, more recently, the Church of England been revealed to have mirrored this moral failure in spades. On Nov 7^th of this year, an independent investigation lead by Keith Makin detailed in 256 pages (AKA the Makin Report) “prolific, brutal and horrific” attacks by John Smyth, a prominent lawyer and lay leader in the Church community, on more than 100 boys and young men starting in the late 1970s. Despite mounting evidence, and full disclosure to Justin Welby as Arch Bishop of Canterbury in 2013 by his leadership, Smyth's abuse was systematically minimized and ignored, much like McCarrick’s, demonstrating that both institutions behaved in a manner which prioritized reputation and public image over the pursuit of justice for the countless victims they brutalized. The Makin Report noted “there was a distinct lack of curiosity shown by these senior figures and a tendency towards minimization of the matter, demonstrated by the absence of any further questioning and follow up.” These scandals of The Church show how clerical power and deference to religious authority have created fertile ground for cover-ups, leaving victims betrayed by the very leaders they trusted most.

But the clerics aren’t just out of control in the kingdom of God. Scandals in the western convert communities of Buddhism have also shattered the illusion of its high-lamas as untouchable embodiments of wisdom and compassion. The Shambhala Buddhist community, once hailed as a beacon of Western Buddhism, was rocked by revelations of sexual misconduct by its leader, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who allegedly groomed and exploited female followers, and extorted his wealthy patrons for large sums of money and material goods. Similarly, Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was accused of decades of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, his behavior shielded by a bureaucratic system of “guru-devotion”. These scandals expose how the hierarchies within Buddhism, much like their Western religious counterparts, have enabled unchecked power and abuse, eroding trust in institutions that many once viewed as pure sanctuaries of spiritual growth. It is a heavy irony that so many wide-eyed hippies of the 60’s and 70’s, quick to pick up the mantel of eastern wisdom amidst their ant-capitalist rebellion of the nuclear family and The Church, have found themselves full circle, wrestling with the very same graft and clerical corruption they sought to abandon in their youth. There are even more salacious and abject rumors of torrid behavior of even higher and more well-known high Lamas that are bound to break in the coming years.

Buckle up all of You Wide-Eyed Boomers….Winter is coming.

Sogyal Rinpoche, the subject of numerous lawsuits and civil claims of sexual and spiritual abuse fled to India in the summer of 2019 where he died later that year

Clericalism, at its core, functions as a bureaucracy where the survival and expansion of the institution take precedence over the moral and religious wellbeing of the very individuals it claims to save. This self-preserving system prioritizes protecting its reputation, authority, and influence above all else, even if it means abandoning the very principles it holds as central to salvation. Scandals across traditions—from the Catholic Church's systematic cover-ups of abuse to Tibetan Buddhism's obfuscation of misconduct by high lamas—reveal how clerical hierarchies shield themselves from accountability, silencing victims and sidelining calls for reform. Rather than serving as guardians of spiritual and ethical guidance for the individual, these institutions become vehicles of power, exploiting the faith and trust of their adherents, which is ultimately cashed in for power and scandal. By placing institutional continuity above truth, compassion, and justice, clericalism undermines the foundations of religious integrity, turning what should be a path to salvation into a brute force means of institutional survival.