Sex, lies and religious roles

I guess the abbot would explain the free vehicle as a business expense, but the cash he allegedly kept is trickier to clarify. The amount was really peanuts for him, but it's the kind of technicality that may topple a giant.

The public could probably care less about the intricacies of bookkeeping and number crunching. It's usually sex that pulls someone off the pedestal.

Of course, one can argue that someone in his position might have used wealth he did not own to bait the women, who in this case did not even dream of becoming his official wife.

But these are separate issues.

One may commit a sin without committing a crime or vice versa. A financially clean person of power may have a secret lover, and the relationship may not necessarily be based on money and power.

But for those growing up on a heavy dose of melodrama, funneling public money into one's personal boudoir makes the perfectly titillating story with a morally black-and-white message.

The truth, unfortunately, may be more opaque and complicated.

First of all, we should refrain from trying anyone, celebrity or not, only in the court of public opinion.

Any citizen should be presumed innocent until proved guilty. Now it is the prosecutor's job to conduct a thorough investigation and sift through the rumors and mud before zeroing in on the facts.

There is one idea that the whole thing was cooked up by a competing agency with interests in the temple's financial performance.

Anyway, both for the abbot's reputation and for the public's right to know, authorities should find out whether he overstepped the line－legally, ethically, religiously or otherwise.

To attribute everything to a kitchen-sink-style sin of greed or the commercialization of religion is the rhetoric of lazy pundits.

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