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November 07, 2004

Church tackles child abuse through vast network of volunteers

Connie Gustafson has spent more than a year training fellow Roman Catholics in Orange, Milford and West Haven in how to recognize — and prevent — child sexual abuse.

But none of her experiences prepared her for what happened during a training session last weekend.

"A woman came up to me and told me how much the videos we use had moved her because she had been molested by an uncle as a young woman," said Gustafson, a communicant at Holy Infant Church in Orange.

Gustafson is at the forefront of an effort by the Archdiocese of Hartford to ensure that sexual-abuse scandals that engulfed the Catholic Church in the United States in recent years never happen again.

She is one of three dozen volunteers from across the archdiocese who were trained last year to serve as volunteer facilitators to implement the training program, which is called Protecting God’s Children.

To date, more than 7,000 archdiocesan employees and parish volunteers have been trained through the program, which began in September 2003.

When Gustafson, a mother of three, was approached by the Rev. Peter Dargan, her priest at Holy Infant, about serving as a facilitator, she was nervous and a little skeptical about what she was getting herself into.

"I was concerned I might not agree with what was taught in the program or that it was being used as a public relations effort by the church," Gustafson said. "But I have to say now that I’m proud to be involved. I look at it this way — there have been some major cover-ups and screw-ups in the past, but this is the church’s way of confronting this and saying that we don’t ever want it to happen again."

WORK IN PROGRESS

That’s not to say that Protecting God’s Children doesn’t frustrate some of the faithful.

During a recent training session in Bristol, Tony Crino asked why the archdiocese can’t hire several full-time employees to speed up the training. Crino is eucharistic minister at St. Gregory’s Church, the parish where the training session was being held.

Delores Skovich, director of safe environments for the archdiocese, explained that the program is still a work in progress. With only about three dozen volunteers to conduct the mandatory training for the thousands of employees and lay volunteers in the archdiocese and its 216 parishes, it takes time to achieve the goals of the program.

"Program facilitators are hard to come by," Skovich said of the volunteer trainers. "It takes time because we don’t have the manpower to do it. We asked for two volunteers from each parish and, if we’d gotten that, we’d have 400 facilitators and we’d be done by now."

Skovich added that like any other organization, the archdiocese must live within a budget and can’t afford to pay people to do the work, she said. Two dozen additional facilitators will be trained in November, which should make things move a little more quickly, she said.

Despite his concerns that the archdiocese ought to make the training a full-time priority, Crino supports the program.

"It makes you aware of what’s going on," Crino said of the three-hour training program. "I came into this skeptical because I had training like this when I was with the Boys Scouts in New York. But I’d say it’s good all around."

Even groups that have been critical in the past of the Catholic Church’s handling of the child-abuse issue said Protecting God’s Children is a step in the right direction.

"I think it’s a good thing because we weren’t doing anything before, but time will tell," said Rick Swenton, a parish leader for Voice of the Faithful, a national group of lay people formed out of concern for the abuse issue.

The program, which nearly three dozen others took at the same time as Crino, includes viewing two videotapes that include interviews with convicted child molesters. After completing the initial course work, the program requires a year’s worth of twice-a-month online updates that are provided by the Oklahoma-based Virtus, the company that designed the program for the church.

OTHER FAITHS

The genesis for Protecting God’s Children is the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which was crafted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in June 2002. The plan came as a response to scandal that had engulfed a number of dioceses across the country, involving priests who had molested youngsters in their parishes.

Training isn’t being limited to adults, either. Starting in January, the archdiocesan schools will launch a program for kindergartners through eighthgraders "that will address how adults relate to children and the appropriate behavior of adults with children," Skovich said.

But as the Protecting God’s Children program — and similar training efforts done by other faith groups — illustrate, the problem is not limited to the Catholic Church.

The Episcopal Church in Connecticut has had similar training since the mid-1990s, said the Rev. David Parachini, coordinator of the Safe Church Training Program and vicar of Grace Episcopal Church in Windsor. The United Church of Christ trains several hundred volunteers and staffers each year, said the Rev. Kathy Peters, associate minister for local church ministries in the state.

There are some differences between the Episcopal and Catholic programs. The Episcopal program is a full-day workshop and doesn’t mandate who must be trained, Parachini said.

"We have a list of people we recommend be trained, but we want the local parishes to make it their own," Parachini said.

Peters said church leaders of all faiths "have been incredibly naive in thinking that this can’t happen in churches."

"The Catholic Church has taken the biggest public hit, but it happens across all denominations," Peters said.

Posted by Nealus at November 7, 2004 12:51 PM

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