Posted on 04/30/2004 9:32:55 AM PDT by Land of the Irish
Virginia’s Arlington Diocese, one of the nation’s most conservative, is still trying to recover from its recent battle over a program to protect children from sexual abuse, a battle that pitted angry parents against secretive diocesan employees—many Catholic parents saw the program as graphic, un-Catholic, and inappropriate for children while the bishop’s office said otherwise. The latter lost the fight—for now. Bishop Paul Loverde picked instead a program for adults but left the door open for the re-introduction of an abuse-prevention program for children. The struggle, one that is taking place in many dioceses in the nation, is not over.
Meanwhile, observers note that the real problem may be the adoption by U.S. bishops of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, a.k.a. the Dallas charter, and its vague language, back in 2002—a step that was supposed to restore trust and credibility in U.S. Catholic leaders but may have instead further muddied the waters.
Under fire for his initial choice of a secular program aimed at children—the “Good Touch, Bad Touch” program—Bp. Loverde has picked a training program directed at adults, “Protecting God’s Children,” to meet some of the requirements of the Dallas charter. The program gives parents and other adults the tools to detect “the warning signs of abuse, the ways to prevent abuse, the methods of properly reporting suspicions of abuse, and responding to allegations of abuse,” said Bp. Loverde in a column in the Arlington Catholic Herald. In use in more than 75 U.S. dioceses, "Protecting God’s Children” is designed by VIRTUS and the National Catholic Risk Retention Group.
Bp. Loverde’s choice marks a departure from the diocese’s initial consideration of “Good Touch, Bad Touch.” It was aimed at children and contained discussions of sexual abuse in the family along with visual descriptions of abusive situations.
However, Bp. Loverde also stated that he still feels bound by the charter to offer a program aimed at children. “Later this Spring, when VIRTUS makes available to dioceses its children’s personal safety program, I and my staff will review it along with other available Catholic programs to see which programs best meet the criteria mentioned above [in the charter requirement],” he wrote in the Herald.
The charter was designed to correct and prevent the sexual abuse of children and young men and women by clergy—abuse that has occurred for decades in numerous dioceses. (It was drafted and adopted largely due to pressure from the media and laity because of several highly scandalous abuse cases that surfaced in the 1980s.) The charter mandated, among other things, the implementation of safe environment programs throughout U.S. dioceses.
However, an element that was not even mentioned in the charter is now taking center stage. A report released in February by the National Review Board, an offspring of the charter, mandated, among other things, to commission a study of the nature and scope of the problem of child abuse committed by Catholic clergy in the United States. The report shows that, overall, 81 percent of abuse victims were male and 78 percent were at, or past, the age of puberty.
In short, the abuse that the charter set out to prevent was mostly perpetrated by homosexual priests against teenage boys. “In other words, most of the abuse involved gay priests molesting teenage boys,” said Deal Hudson, editor-in-chief of Crisis magazine. “This is called homosexuality, not pedophilia.”
However, there is never a mention of homosexuality in the charter, or of the need to weed out homosexual candidates to the priesthood. “Until we go into the seminaries and root out the homosexuals and dissenters, we will not get at the root of the problem” of child abuse, Rev. William M. Aitcheson, pastor of St. John Bosco Church in Woodstock, Va., told the Washington Post. (Further, Pope John XXIII issued a letter in 1961, ordering all bishops and vocations’ offices to exclude homosexuals from the seminary. The U.S. bishops and religious superiors have, by and large, ignored this command.)
Following in the footsteps of the charter, the Arlington Diocese does not mention the problem of homosexual priests on its Web site but, rather, offers an abundance of statistical data regarding the NRB’s commissioned work, the John Jay study. Needless to say, the diocese’s Web site does not mention Pope John XXIII’s letter, or even statements from Pope John Paul II’s spokesman, Jocquin Novaro Vallis, who has said that homosexuals cannot be ordained to the priesthood.
The requirements of the Dallas charter may have set the stage for another PR disaster for the embattled U.S. Catholic leadership. It also may have opened the door for the further abuse of children under the guise of safe environment programs, contend many parents. The charter has given the secular world a document to go to when they want to hurt the Church, said Dan McKenna a Virginia-based lawyer. “They have moved too hastily to create a document that ties their hands,” he added. Now people can go back to the charter and accuse the U.S. bishops of not abiding by their own words. “The document does not create civil liability before the law,” he explained, “it creates the opportunity for a public relations nightmare.” The charter is also a non-canonical document, meaning it was not ratified by Rome and henceforth does not create an obligation vis-à-vis religious authorities either.
“At this point given the problems that have arisen with the execution of terms of the charter, every bishop has an obligation to go back and review” its terms, said McKenna.
It must be noted that in his letter on the “Protecting God’s Children” program, Bp. Loverde never said that he turned down the “Good Touch, Bad Touch” program. All he said was that he had picked a new one intended for adults. And, again, the choice was made in secrecy, in clear violation of the charter’s Article 7, a decision that Christopher Manion, Ph.D. in government and the founder of the Web site “Purity” (www.chaste-environment.org), called an “arbitrary adoption.”
“I believe that fundamental decisions like your arbitrary adoption of the VIRTUS program -- without sharing the elements of the program and its goals with your flock (or even with Miss Nolan, who told us several times within the past 60 days that no other programs were under consideration), and without asking the views of your people -- does nothing to alleviate that crisis of trust and credibility,” stated Manion in an open letter addressed to the bishop.
The diocese had come under fire because “Good Touch, Bad Touch” is a secular program that violates several tenets of the Catholic Faith. The cornerstone of its training for children is its “It’s my body” mantra, a statement directly opposed to Church teachings and readily used by the culture of death to justify abortion and sexual perversions.
The implementation of such programs is a result of the Dallas charter. Article 12 demands that dioceses implement safe environment programs aimed at children. But instead of targeting abusive priests (and bishops), secular programs such as “Good Touch, Bad Touch,” discuss sexual abuse in the family. In effect, kids are taught to watch out for Dad or Mom or Uncle Bob. Parents’ direct involvement is discouraged while “facilitators” are trained to present the program to the children—parents receive separate information sessions.
McKenna, a specialist of juvenile law, has been following the issue of programs directed at children closely because of his connection with organizations concerned with children’s issues and with the tradition of the Catholic Church. The question is whether the charter takes into account Rome’s directions, which say that no sexual information should be introduced during the latency period, roughly between ages 5 and 10. This is where Bishop Loverde’s reading, along with that of many others, may be off. “Nowhere does it say that children should be directly instructed,” McKenna said. The charter recommends the use of “safe environment programs,” and there is a “big difference between that and teaching kids about sexual abuse,” he said. The terminology was politicized.
Sixty Arlington Diocese school employees received the “Good Touch, Bad Touch” training in the summer of 2003. This prompted accusations that, despite what Arlington parents were told, the program had already been chosen, and substantial money had already been invested in it before anyone had even heard of it.
Hence, when diocesan officials attempted to present a revamped “Good Touch, Bad Touch,” they came under fire from irate parents. Nearly 300 people filled All Saints Church in Manassas on Jan. 12. The meeting, intended to last two hours went on for four. Parents questioned and criticized every aspect of the diocese’s offered response to the charter’s requirements. Most importantly, the program was denounced as unfit for children (and un-Catholic) and diocesan representatives were grilled for the secretive way in which they attempted to sneak the program into the diocese’s schools without much communication with parents.
“If you read Article 7 of the Dallas charter, it demands transparency, and all you’ve got in this diocese is secrecy,” said Manion, who attended the Jan. 12 meeting.
Later, at a Jan. 24 meeting, Catherine Nolan, then-diocesan director of child protection and safety, was asked why Arlington parents were not part of the program-selection process and were not contacted with specifics about its contents. “She responded that the children’s protection came first and that parents themselves might be predators,” said Deal Hudson in a Feb. 4 email to his readers. In other words, parents are the problem, not homosexual priests.
Detractors also say the program was not fit for young children, especially as they enter the latency period. The program’s visual elements, together with its use of the term “sexual abuse” bothered many parents. “Some of those charts had a picture of a grown man fondling the groin of a young boy,” said Manion, who spent some six hours reviewing the program in the chancery office. Paradoxically, “if I were a priest in Arlington Diocese showing this to a young boy, the bishop would have every right to throw me out for life,” said Manion.
According to “The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality,” a document issued by the Pontifical Council for the Family: “It can be said that a child is in the stage described in John Paul II’s words as the ‘age of innocence’ from about five years of age until puberty—the beginning of which can be set at the first signs of changes in the boy’s or girl’s body. … This period of tranquility and serenity must never be disturbed by unnecessary information about sex. …
“In some societies today there are planned and determined attempts to impose premature sex information on children, but at this stage of development, children are still not capable of fully understanding the value of the affective dimension of sexuality. They cannot understand and control sexual imagery within the proper context of moral principles and, for this reason, they cannot integrate premature sexual information with moral responsibility. Such information tends to shatter their emotional and educational development and to disturb the natural serenity of this period of life.”
One could argue, and many Catholic parents do, that sexual-abuse prevention programs for children are contrary to traditional Catholic teaching. Indeed, as the Popes and the Church have taught, education (especially sexual education) is the duty, first, of parents. Such intimate, personal topics must be addressed by parents—not diocesan bureaucrats, and certainly not by diocesan school teachers or, perhaps, by a homosexual parish priest.
As a result of the fallout from the meetings in January, Catherine Nolan resigned. She had stopped returning phone calls and emails for more than two weeks when her resignation was announced by the diocese on Feb. 7. The announcement of her resignation came as she was halfway through what was supposed to be a year-long assignment.
Nolan had come under fire most recently during a diocesan PTO meeting in which she refused to state publicly whether she was pro-life. Many people viewed that as an implicit admission that she was not. “If the inability to affirm one of the most basic Church teachings, by a diocesan official, in a Church, in front of Catholic parents, doesn’t tell you all you need to know about the real problem we’re facing in the Church today … well, there is not much else I can say” said Hudson.
What happened in Arlington is not unique, however. Another popular program, “Talking About Touching” (TAT), is used in more than 5,000 public schools nationwide. It was designed by prostitution advocates. The program was implemented in Boston’s Catholic schools last year, despite parents protests. TAT is the offspring of the Committee for Children, the cleaned-up name for COYOTE, Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics, an advocacy group for prostitution, as reported by Mary Jo Anderson in WorldNetDaily. “The forerunner of COYOTE was WHO, ‘Whores, Housewives and Others,’” Anderson quoted Margo St James, founder of COYOTE and a former prostitute. “Others meant lesbian but it was not being said out loud yet,” St James added.
TAT is one of the top three programs nationwide, according to a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops office staff member, cited by Anderson.
Stay tuned. It’s going to be a long battle.
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The report shows that, overall, 81 percent of abuse victims were male and 78 percent were at, or past, the age of puberty.IOW --
22% pedophilic abuse
15% heterosexual abuse
63% homosexual abuse.
Get rid of the homosexuals and the predatory sexual abuse problem goes away. It really is THAT simple.
Without the homos, the so-called abuse problem would be nearly non-existent. The child abuse rate within the clergy would be FAR below comparable secular vocations.
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