Bishop Blase Cupich of Rapid City, South Dakota, currently serves as chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Protection of Children and Young People. Today America magazine posted an article by Bishop Cupich entitled "Twelve Things the Bishops Have Learned from the Abuse Crisis." 

Bishop Cupich does a fine job of articulating many of the painful lessons the bishops have learned over the course of the past ten years, and he should be applauded for doing so.

While there may be things that in my opinion should be emphasized more (or perhaps less), overall I can stand behind 11 of the 12 "lessons." The one that gives me concern is lesson 7, which provides as follows:

"The church needs to maintain the mandatory safe environment efforts that have been developed. Experience shows that institutions are not as effective in protecting children if standards are voluntary. Any backsliding on this endangers children first of all, and also the credibility gained through the efforts to eradicate the effects of this scourge. Parishes must be the safest places for a child to be."

Now before you think I'm off my rocker, let me clarify that I don't have any trouble with what's actually written here. Who wouldn't want kids to have a "safe environment," to prevent "backsliding" when it comes to protecting children, or to ensure that parishes are the safest places for our children?

Rather, my concerns involve implementation. The "safe environment" courses as they quickly became mandated in most dioceses may be nice window dressing for the media and make sense from a legal "risk managment" perspective, but I think in large part they miss the mark.

For one thing, they seem to forget that while sex abuse of minor is a problem across the board, the crisis that the bishops are dealing with is rightly called a clerical sex abuse crisis. In other words, it's about the priests, not the teachers, parish staff and volunteers, or parents. And far more often than not, it involves a homosexual encounter with a teenage boy. I'm not saying that nothing has been done to improve the screening and follow-up scrutiny of seminary applicants, but those don't seem to receive the same level of attention and commitment. In some quarters there is even resistance to Vatican directives regarding the admission of homosexual men to the priesthood in this country. So pardon me for resenting all the hoops a lay person has to jump through just to volunteer in the parish!

And second, in terms of the children's classroom component, I am absolutely convinced that most programs (certainly the first generation of programs) run afoul of what the Church has to say regarding chastity education in the 1995 Vatican document Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality. Whether it's called "sex ed" or "chasity formation" or "theology of the body," or whether it's in connection with "safe environment" mandates, the provisions of TMHS should apply. For more on TMHS, click here or here. When the scandal broke and there was a rush to "do something," it seemed that TMHS was swept aside for the sake of expediency.

I'm all for "safe environments" as together we address this complex problem and work to rebuild trust with utmost candor, charity, and pastoral care. However, I don't think it's right for parents and children to pay for the sins of the man called Father. Let's make the environment safe first and foremost by removing the predators, not by poisoning the prey and stealing their innocence.