This story appeared in yesterday’s WaPo. Arlington has not complied with all the requirements of the child protection policy adopted in 2002.
The audit said that Arlington has not yet launched a “safe environment” program for children to raise their awareness of inappropriate conduct by adults. It also has not been conducting proper criminal background checks on diocesan personnel who come into contact with children, relying instead on a “self-reporting method” for obtaining information, the audit said.
Catherine Nolan, the Arlington diocese’s director of child protection and safety, said that the diocese is addressing those deficiencies.
Missing from this intermediate “report card” is the fact that since the formation of the Diocese, Arlington has had no proven cases of child sexual abuse and paid no settlement money. These important fact should be included in the comprehensive report that is coming out in February. That report will contain info on sex abuse cases and settlements for each Diocese over the US for the last 50 years. Expect the spin in the media to be tremendous.
Many moons ago, when I worked for the Diocese, I had to fill out a thick packet of information, mainly dealing with past sex crimes and whether I had an unnatural attraction to children. My wife did the same thing when she worked as a part-time music teacher for our parish school. Arlington has been on top of this for a long time.
I concur! 12 years ago when I was a youth minister, I had to attend a two hour session required of all volunteers and paid staff who work with youth. Several hundred people from Arlington were in attendance.
What’s also curious is that the WaPo story said that the self-reporting had to do with priests not with the lay volunteers. That is, the lay volunteers were in fact checked out properly. ?? And the Arlington diocese paper somehow finessed the whole thing today. To read it one would never imagine that the WaPo story *could be* written, let alone that it had been. Something else I want to know is what kind of program DC has for children if it passed the audit, and how does it compare with Good Touch, Bad Touch, the program Arlington wants either to put in or not to put in….