{"id":3548,"date":"2006-03-31T09:50:36","date_gmt":"2006-03-31T09:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/the-audit.html"},"modified":"2006-03-31T09:50:36","modified_gmt":"2006-03-31T09:50:36","slug":"the-audit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/the-audit.html","title":{"rendered":"The audit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several reports:<\/p>\n

The Washington Times:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Sex-abuse accusations against the nation’s priests were down last year, but the flood of millions of dollars in payouts more than tripled and shows no signs of stopping, the United States’ Roman Catholic bishops said yesterday.
    "It is disheartening to us bishops, as it must be to all Catholics, to find that there are still some allegations of abuse by clerics against today’s children and young people," Bishop William S. Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said during the release of the conference’s annual report on sex-abuse statistics. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I found this a startling statement, and while I’m noexpert, hard to believe:<\/p>\n

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A supplemental report, issued by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said there were no warning signs for the typical abuser, who is a priest in his late 30s who has been ordained 11 years. Diocesan priests tended to be abusers twice as much as priests from religious orders.
    "The red flags aren’t there," said Karen Terry, the report’s principal investigator. Except for a small group of serial abusers who began abusing children around the time of their ordinations, "there are no identifiable psychological problems." <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No, we’re not talking about greasy men in trenchcoats, but I’m having a hard time believing that a sexually abusive cleric has "no identifiable psychologcial problems." I cannot even figure out what that means.<\/p>\n

Zenit, with a summary:<\/a><\/p>\n

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— 532 clergy (463 diocesan and 69 religious institute) were accused. About 82% of these clergy were already out of ministry: 418 (including 374 diocesan clergy) are deceased, already removed from ministry, already dismissed from the clerical state, or without a known address; and another 20 (including 18 diocesan clergy) were permanently removed from ministry in 2005. <\/p>\n

— 57 (including 44 diocesan clergy) were temporarily removed from ministry in 2005. Twelve (all diocesan) were returned to ministry in 2005. Fourteen (including 13 diocesan clergy) identified in 2005 were still in active ministry pending investigation of an allegation. Fourteen diocesan and three religious institute clergy with an allegation prior to 2005 were also described as still active pending investigation. <\/p>\n

Of the 532 clergy accused in 2005, over 61% had already been identified in prior allegations. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Karen Terry, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the vast majority of the abuse took place from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. There has been a sharp decline in the number of cases since the early 1990s, which an analysis indicates is not just a matter of a lag in reporting, she said.<\/p>\n

\n
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"We know that sexual abuse is underreported and that more people will come forward," she said. "But the decrease in sexual abuse cases is real." She added that the decline mirrors the general societal decrease in crime, substance abuse and sex abuse in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Teresa M. Kettelkamp, a former Illinois state police officer who heads the bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection, said "it is important to acknowledge how much has been done" to remove abusers from the priesthood, including 57 priests who were suspended in 2005.<\/p>\n

She said U.S. dioceses have conducted background checks on 1.6 million adults who work with minors and have provided "safe environment" training to 5.7 million children, 95 percent of all those entrusted to the care of the church.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

22 dioceses are not "in compliance," most of them, as this article states because they’ve not instituted "safe environment" programs<\/a> – controversial, as we well know. <\/p>\n

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Like most other dioceses in that category \u2014 cited in the bishops’ third annual report on sex-abuse prevention policies \u2014 the Twin Cities archdiocese has lagged in offering "safe-environment training" to all children in its schools and parish programs.<\/p>\n

Archdiocese officials say their noncompliance was no surprise because they have tried to methodically introduce programs that nonetheless have brought about a firestorm of opposition from some local Catholics.<\/p>\n

The archdiocese \u2014 which has conducted abuse-prevention training for its priests, deacons and staff and continues offering it to volunteers \u2014 plans to implement the training in its schools and parish education programs beginning this fall.<\/p>\n

Since last year, however, some local Catholic groups have deluged the archdiocese with complaints about the proposed programs, particularly those intended for pupils in kindergarten through fourth grade.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Both the audit and the John Jay Report are linked on the bishop’s website here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several reports: The Washington Times: Sex-abuse accusations against the nation’s priests were down last year, but the flood of millions of dollars in payouts more than tripled and shows no signs of stopping, the United States’ Roman Catholic bishops said yesterday.     "It is disheartening to us bishops, as it must be to all…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe audit - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/the-audit.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The audit - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}