10 Dark Facts You Didn't Know About Religious Leaders

10 Dark Facts You Didn't Know About Major World Religious Leaders

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re looking at 10 Dark Facts You Didn't Know About Major World Religious Leaders.

For this list, we’ll be looking at lesser-known controversies involving significant figures from multiple major religions.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Pope Urban II Provides Justification for Centuries of Slaughter

Pope Urban II is best known for getting the ball rolling on The Crusades. In 1095, he spoke at the Council of Clermont. He codified the Catholic Church’s new doctrine of holy war or bellum sacrum. Before then, rulers - even Christian kings - could find all kinds of material justifications for war. But as of 1095, the Church representing the Prince of Peace could rubber stamp war. At Clermont, Urban launched the first Crusade to conquer Jerusalem. For the next two hundred years, boys and men from all over Europe traveled to a foreign land to earn their way into heaven with violence.

Swami Premananda Was a Convicted Murderer

Prem Kumar was born in Sri Lanka and at a young age became drawn to spiritual life. He became a guru, adopting the name of Swami Premananda, traveling the world. His ashram in Sri Lanka burned to the ground during ethnic riots in 1983, so he fled to India. He only grew in popularity until 1994. One of the girls at the ashram claimed that Premananda forced himself on her and several others - some of whom were underage. He allegedly used his position and promises of miracle cures to coerce them all. Another resident named Ravi was allegedly murdered and buried on the ashram grounds. After a circus of a trial, he was convicted in 1997 and died in prison, maintaining his innocence.

Jim Bakker Was/Is a Corrupt Televangelist

Jim Bakker, with his program “The PTL Club,” was a trailblazer of televangelism. In the 1970s and 1980s, he became a fixture for white evangelical Christians in the United States. Bakker's ministry seemed to be on an unstoppable rise until its swift collapse in 1987. Hush money payments to the church secretary were discovered, meant to cover up an extra-marital assault. Investigators soon discovered years of accounting fraud. Bakker was charged and convicted of multiple felonies and went to prison. He lost both his marriage to Tammy Faye Bakker and his ministry. After his release, Bakker remarried and returned to the small screen with his new church. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave controversy behind him. In 2020, Bakker was accused of selling fake treatments for Covid-19.

Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein Committed Multi-Million-Dollar Fraud Schemes

Unlike many religious institutions, Judaism doesn’t necessarily have a central governing body. It’s a relatively small and decentralized religion, with community leaders often wielding significant institutional power. One such leader, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, led the Chabad organization in Poway, California. One year after getting wounded in a hate crime shooting, Rabbi Goldstein pleaded guilty to tax and wire fraud. In 2020, Rabbi Goldstein was convicted for misusing over six million dollars in contributions and donations. According to the DOJ, the rabbi and five co-conspirators spent decades skimming and laundering money through his synagogue. In 2022, he was sentenced to fourteen months in custody and to pay back millions in restitution.

Kriyananda Is a Fraudster & Sexual Harasser

James Donald Walters was a white American who converted to Hinduism in 1948. He became a direct disciple of a popular religious leader. Eventually, Walters adopted the name of Kriyananda and founded his own worldwide spiritual movement, Ananda. He wrote hundreds of books and pamphlets published in 28 languages, selling millions of copies. He lectured around the world and spoke multiple languages. He was also found guilty of fraud in Palo Alto, California in 1998 during a sexual harassment lawsuit. Kriyananda portrayed himself as a celibate religious leader despite three decades of using his position to exploit several female devotees. He was also embroiled in a 12-year-long lawsuit for infringing upon the copyright of his mentor.

Pope Urban VI Was a Torturer

Pope Urban VI was a complex figure. He spent his papacy at odds with powerful figures both within the Church and without. The rift grew into a major, forty-year schism in the Roman Catholic Church. On the one hand, Urban was at odds with a number of powerful Cardinals because he hated their greed and corruption. He forbade them from accepting gifts, meaning bribes, from rulers, nobles, and merchants. On the other hand, he dealt with those Cardinals with abject cruelty. He learned that six of them were conspiring to depose him, so he had them all arrested. The six Cardinals were then brutally tortured and executed. According to legend, Pope Urban VI complained that their pained screaming was not loud enough.

Rabbi Walter Homolka Covered Up Abuse

In 2022, a German law firm famous for investigating child mistreatment within the Catholic Church set their sights on the largest Jewish Organization in Germany. Rabbi Walter Homolka founded Germany’s non-Orthodox rabbinical schools, the Reform Abraham Geiger College and the Conservative Zacharias Frankel College at the University of Potsdam. He had to give up control when allegations began to surface. Homolka’s husband allegedly sent lewd messages to students and relied on Homolka to cover it up. According to reporting, the head Rabbi established an ‘atmosphere of fear,’ threatening to ‘eradicate’ anyone who opposed him. It’s the biggest scandal to rock German Jewry since World War II.

Pope John XII Was a Murderous Cassanova

The list of misdeeds that follow the legacy of Pope John XII would require its own Top 20 video. While some may stem from anti-Catholic sources a thousand years ago, one thing is abundantly clear: giving a teenager untrammeled power is a recipe for disaster. John XII was made prince of Rome before eventually ascending to the papacy around age twenty. His reign was marked by one alleged depravity after another, with his palace described as a brothel by contemporaries. He was accused of repeatedly forcing himself on multiple women, including his own sisters. John supposedly at one point seduced a widow by giving her control of several Italian cities. He led Rome to ruin, invited invasion, and was eventually killed by a lover’s husband.

Sogyal Rinpoche Accused of Abuse

Sogyal Rinpoche was a Tibetan Dzogchen lama. In Tibetan Buddhism, lamas are a little bit more than a spiritual leader. They are oftentimes recognized to be reincarnated leaders from the past. That was the case with Sogyal Rinpoche; he was recognized as the reincarnation of a 19th-century visionary saint who once taught the Dalai Lama. As the world has come to learn the hard way, even saints can sin. A $10 million suit was filed against Sogyal Rinpoche in 1994. He was accused of leveraging his position and spiritual weight to induce his female students into physical relationships. He was accused of inflicting emotional distress and physical battery. While the suit was settled out of court, even the Dalai Lama acknowledged the man’s disgrace.

Cardinal Law & the Church's Cover-up

The Catholic Church has spent decades rocked by scandals all over the world. Multiple popes oversaw the systemic cover-up of abusive priests. In 2002, the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team cracked the Boston branch of the scandal wide open. Cardinal Law had used his political power to cover up the actions of dozens of priests for decades. They were shuffled around from diocese to diocese to conceal their crimes. Though Cardinal Law was forced to step down, he was rewarded by Pope John Paul II with an appointment to Rome. The scandal is ongoing. In 2023, the Illinois attorney general announced the results of an investigation into another massive conspiracy.