It looks like the “safe touch sex education” programs in Minneapolis-St. Paul are a wee bit more flexible than those in Boston. The bearing blog describes that at his parish they have decided not to use Talking about Touching in their parish, an option provided by the archdiocese, and will instead use a more appropriate program. The archdiocese is offering family-based training, which I assume means training the parents and letting them teach their kids. This seems to be a decent compromise.
Still, no one has yet offered a good response to my question: Why should the Church be running these child-abuse programs?
Why is it the Church’s duty to run sex abuse prevention programs for children? Now, I can agree that the archdiocese has a duty to make sure that it has oversight of priests and employees to prevent them from abusing kids, but under what law or principle does the Church have an obligation to educate kids about sex abuse? The Church doesn’t have that authority. Only parents have that authority. Now if there were an optional program offered for parents who could sign up to receive training that they could pass on to their kids that would be fine. But forcing the Archdiocese to force “touching safety” programs on kids is unconscionable and a violation of our rights. Why not require the Church to teach, say, gun safety? Kids need to be safe around guns. Oh, is it because some bishops were negligent and allowed abuse to occur in Church? So why does that mean that the Church must take on the role of “safe environment sex education” programs? It should just mean the Church has to make sure it doesn’t put abusers among kids.
Technorati Tags: Catholic, Minneapolis, sex-abuse
To answer your question.
The priests who were caught buggering altar boys are the tip of the iceberg and there remains a financially significant number of unsound priests malformed in the sixties and seventies who are dangerous. The bishops see no way to root out the problem.
Why must the innocence of children be violated to protect teenage boys from corruption? Because you would have to teach them to be wary of predatory homosexuals. This would be unacceptable to the powerful homosexual element in the priesthood and the religious orders.
So why are the bishops unwilling to confront the corruption in the priesthood head on? Some of them are corrupt themselves and most of them understand their role from a managerial, institutional and political framework rather than as spiritual fatherhood of the Catholic community. This is how they got into trouble with the abusers in the first place.
Why are such men chosen to be bishops in the first place? It has been Vatican policy for 40 years to manage dissent without generating uproar in the Church. Therefore, they have appointed managers and politicians rather than spiritual fathers to positions of power.