The Abuse Cases — The Help Line, the Privilege, and the Doctrine

Begin where any decent person begins. A child was harmed for years, and no argument on this page is offered to make that smaller than it is.

First, the Thing Itself

The Gospel of Jesus Christ has no ambiguity about the abuse of a child, and the Savior’s language is the harshest He ever used about anything.

Matthew 18:6

“Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

And on any man who uses position or priesthood to cover such a thing, the revelation is equally direct: when a man begins to exercise control or dominion in unrighteousness, “Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man” (D&C 121:37). The authority does not survive the act. It ends.

Jacob rebuked the men of his people for wounding “the tender feelings” of their wives and children and said their sobbings ascended to God against them (Jacob 2:31–35). Nothing on this page qualifies any of that.

The Case, Stated Accurately

In August 2022 the Associated Press published an investigation drawing on roughly 12,000 pages of records from a lawsuit in Arizona. The facts of the underlying crime are not in dispute and should not be softened.

Paul Adams, a Border Patrol employee in Bisbee, Arizona, sexually abused his daughter over a period of years and later abused a second daughter. He was stopped in 2017 by federal arrest, not by anything else. A bishop had learned of the abuse in a confessional setting and called the Church’s abuse help line, and was advised that the communication was privileged under Arizona law.

Those children suffered for years after an adult in a position of trust knew something. No legal ruling makes that acceptable, and nobody should pretend otherwise. The question this page addresses is a narrower one, and it is the question the critics are actually raising: was the help line built to bury reports?

What the Help Line Is

Understand the problem it was built to solve. A bishop is not a professional clergyman. He is a plumber, an accountant, a schoolteacher — an unpaid volunteer called from the congregation, serving a few years, with a full-time job and a family.

Now hand that man the worst thirty minutes of his life and require him to know, instantly, what the mandatory-reporting statute of his particular state requires, whether it applies to clergy, whether a confessional exception attaches, and what he must do in the next hour. Reporting law is not uniform — it varies materially from state to state and country to country.

The help line exists so he does not have to guess. It is staffed around the clock and puts him immediately in contact with legal and clinical counsel who know the law where he is standing. The alternative — a volunteer improvising alone — is worse for victims, not better.

Who Wrote the Privilege

Here is the fact that the coverage almost always omits, and it changes the target of the complaint.

Clergy-penitent privilege is not a Latter-day Saint doctrine, policy, or invention. It is statutory law, enacted by legislatures, and some form of it exists in all fifty states. It protects the Catholic priest in the confessional, the rabbi, the Protestant pastor, and the Latter-day Saint bishop identically. It exists because legislatures decided that a person who has done something terrible must have somewhere to say it aloud, and that most such people will say it nowhere if the room is not sealed.

On April 7, 2023, the Arizona Supreme Court held that the Church’s conduct fell within that statutory exemption — that the state legislature had written the privilege and it applied. The plaintiffs did not prevail on that point.

So state the objection precisely. Anyone who believes the privilege should be narrowed is making a serious argument, and it is an argument about a STATUTE. It is properly directed at legislatures, and it applies with identical force to every denomination in the country. Aiming it at one church, as though that church wrote the law or is uniquely covered by it, is not a reform proposal. It is a target selection.

What Is Actually Required of Leaders

The picture of a system designed to suppress does not survive contact with the instructions leaders actually operate under.

Standing Requirements

Report as the law requires. Leaders are instructed to comply with reporting obligations, and the help line exists to tell them what those obligations are.

Protect first. The first duty on learning of abuse is the safety of the victim and of other potential victims.

Church discipline is independent of the courts. An abuser faces Church membership action whether or not the state prosecutes, and abuse is grounds for the most serious action available.

Two-deep leadership. Adults are not to be alone with a child in Church settings; classes and activities require two responsible adults.

Required training. Those working with children and youth must complete abuse-prevention training, and it is repeated rather than one-time.

Those are the rules of an organization trying to keep children safe in tens of thousands of congregations staffed entirely by volunteers. They are not the rules of a cover-up.

The Hard Part, Said Plainly

A page that stopped at the legal answer would deserve the contempt it received, so do not stop there.

The privilege is a real moral difficulty, and honest people feel it. It exists because a sealed room draws confessions that would otherwise never be spoken, and because a society that pries open the confessional gets fewer confessions rather than more justice. That reasoning is sound. It is also cold comfort to a child who was not protected while the reasoning held.

Both of those are true at once, and pretending either away is dishonest. What can be said without qualification is this: confession does not absolve. A man who confesses abuse and continues has not repented and is not forgiven — “by this ye may know if a man repenteth of his sins—behold, he will confess them and FORSAKE them” (D&C 58:43). A confession without forsaking buys nothing from God, and it never did.

The Verdict

The charge is that a church built a system to hide the abuse of children. Test the charge against what the system actually is.

This is what the help line does: connects an unpaid volunteer with counsel who knows his jurisdiction’s reporting law, at any hour. This is who created clergy-penitent privilege: state legislatures, in all fifty states, protecting every denomination equally. This is what the Arizona Supreme Court held in 2023: that the statute the legislature wrote applied. This is what the doctrine says about the abuser: a millstone, and amen to his authority. This is what the doctrine says about confession alone: it is worth nothing without forsaking.

Anyone who wants the privilege narrowed should say so and take it to a legislature, where it can actually be changed and where it would apply to every church rather than one. That is a real argument, honestly made.

But those daughters in Bisbee were not failed by a doctrine. They were failed by their father, who committed the crime, and by a legal framework that is the same for every faith in America. And if you have been hurt in this way — by anyone, in any congregation — the Gospel of Jesus Christ does not ask you to protect the person who did it. Tell someone who can stop it. That is the first duty, and it belongs to everyone.