Let's skip the part where I acknowledge that most religious leaders genuinely love children and want them to be safe. You know it. I know it. And frankly, the children who got abused inside religious institutions knew it too...right up until the moment they found out what that love was actually worth when it bumped up against institutional self-interest.

Talk is cheap.

Implementing the systems that actually prevent child abuse? That costs something. And that cost, not ignorance, not negligence, not even malice, — is the real reason children remain at risk inside religious organizations around the world.

I've spent 40 years helping organizations change. The hardest truth I've learned is this: institutions don't fail to protect the vulnerable because they don't care. They fail because the price of real protection is higher than they're willing to pay.

Let me show you exactly what I mean.

The Catholic Priest in Ecuador: Two-Deep Leadership?

I live in Ecuador. I've watched the Catholic Church operate here up close, and I have genuine admiration for the priests who serve in rural communities, often with almost nothing, doing work most people wouldn't take on.

And still, the standard of a priest working alone with children is accepted without question.

The fix is well-established: two-deep leadership. No adult is ever alone with a minor. Period. Two responsible adults present at all times. It's the policy the Boy Scouts adopted after their own catastrophic failures. It's what every serious child protection framework recommends.

So why doesn't the Catholic Church in Ecuador, or most of Latin America, implement it consistently?

Because it would change everything and that change isn't cheap.

Two-deep leadership means a priest can no longer counsel a teenager alone in a back room. It means confessionals need to be restructured or supervised. It means the quiet, unobserved relationship between clergy and child, which is the entire social architecture through which a Catholic priest builds influence in a community, gets fundamentally altered.

It strips the priest of independence. Of power. Of control.

And the Church has built its entire model of pastoral care around that independence. The priest as the singular, trusted, spiritually authoritative figure in a child's life. Change the access model and you change the power model. Change the power model and you change the business model.

So instead, the Church issues statements. Forms committees. Transfers problem priests. Apologizes beautifully.

And children keep getting hurt.

The LDS Bishop: Stop the Creepy One-on-One Interviews

If you're not familiar with standard Latter-day Saint practice, here's something that would make most child protection professionals go pale: LDS Bishops routinely conduct private, one-on-one interviews with youth, teenagers from ages 12 to 16, that include explicit questions about sexual behavior, including masturbation.

These are not trained therapists. They are lay clergy with no clinical background, meeting alone with minors, asking intimate questions about their bodies and sexual lives, and then rendering spiritual judgment.

From a child protection standpoint, this practice ticks almost every box on the "how abuse happens" checklist: private access, sexual subject matter, power differential, and a theological framework that discourages the child from questioning the authority of the adult.

The fix is obvious: end solo interviews with minors. Full stop. If pastoral conversations about sexuality must happen at all, require a parent or second adult to be present, or move these discussions out of the bishop's office entirely.

But here's the problem. That interview isn't just a pastoral check-in. It's a mechanism of authority. The bishop's ability to sit alone with a teenager and assess their worthiness — including their sexual worthiness — is how the ecclesiastical power structure gets reproduced in the next generation.

Ending the interview strips the bishop of his power to judge.

And in a lay clergy system built on ecclesiastical discernment, that power is the whole ballgame. Reform the interview and you're not just changing a policy. You're challenging the theology of leadership itself.

So instead, the Church asks bishops to be more sensitive. Offers better training. Publishes updated guidelines.

And children keep getting hurt.

The Pattern Is the Problem

Here's what Catholic leadership in Ecuador and LDS leadership in Salt Lake City have in common: they have both accurately assessed the cost of real change and decided it's too high.

This isn't cynicism on my part. It's organizational analysis. I've watched this dynamic play out in corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and yes, religious institutions. When the cost of genuine change threatens the core operating model, organizations almost universally choose adaptation over transformation.

They find a version of "change" that preserves the essential architecture of power while creating the appearance of reform. New language. New training. New committees. New apologies.

The one thing they don't change is the structural condition that enabled the harm in the first place, because that condition is also the one that makes the institution work the way it works.

In my book Creating Safe Spaces, I call this the protection paradox: the very features of an institution that make it feel safe and spiritually powerful; the trusted leader with private access, the authority to probe the inner life, the culture of unquestioning deference are the exact features that make it dangerous to children.

You cannot solve the protection paradox by being nicer or trying harder. You solve it by changing the architecture.

So What Do You Actually Do?

If you're a religious leader reading this and you're serious, not performatively serious, but actually serious, here's where to start:

Accept that protecting children will cost you something real. Not money (though it may cost money too). It will cost you power, convenience, independence, and the comfortable feeling that your good intentions are enough. If you're not willing to pay that price, please stop issuing statements about how much you care. It insults everyone's intelligence.

Implement two-deep leadership without exceptions. No adult alone with a minor. Ever. For any reason. Yes, this changes how ministry works. It is supposed to.

End private interviews with children about sexuality. If your theological tradition requires this kind of assessment, find a way to do it that doesn't put a child alone in a room with an authority figure asking about their sexual behavior. There is no version of child protection best practices that endorses this.

Build external accountability. Not an internal review board. Not a committee of your own trusted leaders. An actual external body — ideally with mandatory reporting obligations — that can investigate concerns, act on them, and isn't beholden to protecting institutional reputation.

Tell your community what you're doing and why. Not in legal language designed to minimize liability. In plain, honest speech that treats your congregation like adults capable of handling the truth.

The Hard Truth About Religious Institutions and Change

Organizations change when the cost of not changing exceeds the cost of changing.

For too many religious institutions, that crossover point hasn't arrived yet. The legal settlements get paid. The departing members get replaced. The news cycle moves on. The cost of genuine structural reform still looks higher than the cost of managed reputation.

That calculation will shift. It's already shifting in countries where litigation, regulation, and cultural change are making the old model untenable. The institutions that wait for external force to make them change will pay a far higher price — in human terms and institutional terms — than those that choose transformation now.

But here's the thing about choosing transformation: you actually have to choose it.

Not declare it. Not workshop it. Not form a task force to study it. Do what works.

Choose it. Pay for it. Implement it. And then have the institutional courage to protect it when the people whose power it threatens, and there will be many, push back.

The children sitting in your pews this Sunday are counting on you to do exactly that.

Whether you will is, as always, entirely up to you.

Quinn Price is an organizational effectiveness consultant, resilience researcher, and author of Creating Safe Spaces and 15 other books on organizational change, team effectiveness, and building institutions that match their stated values. He works from Ecuador and consults globally. Learn more at QuinnPrice.com.

If you're a religious leader ready to move from talk to action, Creating Safe Spaces is a practical starting point. Reach out if you want to go further.