We have been assured by the bishops and more specifically, their child-abuse prevention experts, that if only we put kids through “sex abuse sex education programs” and do criminal background checks of all the moms and old ladies volunteering in our parishes, then we won’t need to worry about the Scandal anymore. Never mind that a giant chunk of the abuse was perpetrated by pervert priests aided and abetted by bishops who shuffled them from assignment to assignment and so-called treatment centers that only confirmed the abusers in their perversions.
Meanwhile, one of our criticisms of the media’s coverage of the Scandal was how it focused so much on the problems in the Church and seemed to ignore the—by all accounts—worse problem in public schools.
Well, it looks like the public schools are learning faster than the Church about how to prevent abuse.
After a rash of embarrassing arrests involving five Bay State teachers who had stellar reputations in the classroom, at least one school district is considering changing its hiring practices to protect students. “We have learned that CORI reports are not 100 (percent) reliable and the process is not foolproof,” Lowell Superintendent Karla Brooks-Baehr said in an e-mail.
Gee, haven’t I been saying that for years now? I’ve been saying that criminal background checks only tell you if someone’s been convicted, and even then, according to this story, it doesn’t always tell you everything. Several teachers now being investigated for various problems apparently had convictions that didn’t show up in the CORI reports. Of course, I’m not sure the Lowell school district’s solution is all that effective.
Do the right thing
Two points:
(1) When you say, “If he engages in legal, but illicit sexual conduct…” I think you mean “legal but immoral conduct.” Illicit just means illegal.
(2) The reluctance on the part of bishops to establish such a database as you suggest may have more to do with insurance liability issues than with anything else. Even the sex-offender registries around the country have faced severe resistance from ACLU types, and the subject of these registries are people who have been convicted in a court of law! Imagine the number of attorneys salivating at the possibility of a registry of people who are merely thought to be immoral. . .