Scott Douglas Jacobsen

I doubt this is comprehensive, nor is it representative of the positives of the church either; it is reportage on the reports from the news. I didn’t see a compendium, so decided to write one.

Another purpose for this catalog is because of the lack of news play about the Eastern Orthodox Church compared to the Roman Catholic Church, and its trial of Galileo, and torture, hunting of witches, and the Inquisition, and the child sexual abuse scandal, even Bruno, of course.

But what about the second largest Christian sect in the world boasting over 300 million members? In many of these cases, I believe the secular and ordinary religious stand in solidarity, moral alignment. So let’s begin:

According to the Greek Reporter, a priest, Adam Metropoulos, was convicted of sexual abuse on four counts. Forgive the direct language and emotional tone in the latter portions of this sentence, but the sexual abuse equates to rape, Metropoulos raped.

His sentencing, circa, April 27, totals 12 years in prison. Ann Murray, the Superior Court Justice, stated that she also sentenced him to “3 years of probation after he gets out of prison” and would have to “register with the Main Sex Offender Registry for the rest of his life.”

Murray noted the impacts on the victims was “great” or significant. At the trial, a former altar boy from St. George Greek Orthodox Church testified. The former altar boy was 23-years-old, and reported being sexually assaulted by Murray.

This was during sleep overs at the Metropoulos’s home. The Greek Report noted that “police found pornographic images in the offender’s computer,” which portrayed “a family member that he would secretly film in the nude, as well as other photographs of different people, some of them children.”

On the day of the arrest, the Greek orthodox diocese in Maine made a suspension of Metropoulos. In Metropoulos’s defense, he stated that he never had intercourse with the teenager, but that he touched the alter boy, at the time, in an inappropriate way while he was asleep.