My parish was offering the very last VIRTUS training session last night from 6:30 to 9:30, so my husband and I reluctantly agreed to attend. Pete is going to coach soccer and I know he wants to teach PSR again next year. I want to keep my options open so we both decided to “just do it.”
Overall the training didn’t seem 3 hours long. The video presentation was well done and interesting. The discussion was kind of boring, but I’m a “just give me the facts” kind of person and don’t like discussing the minutia and I sure as heck don’t want to discuss how I “feel” about what I just saw. But overall it wasn’t bad.
I did find that the information about how to spot an abuser was very helpful as well as ways to prevent abuse, and I made sure my kids heard about it all day today. Calvin particularly seemed very interested in ways a trusted adult might try to lure him or his siblings. So as a mom I’m glad I went and I’m glad I got the information in a free training session.
However as a church volunteer, I’m still slightly ticked that I was required to sit through a training program that has nothing to do with my PSR work for absolutely no compensation. Additionally, it bothered me that while the video went to great lengths to say that pedophilia is NOT a homosexual problem, in the Catholic Church scandal it WAS a homosexual problem. O.K. – in the general population, in the context of society at large, it’s probably true that it’s more non-gay.But in the context of what happened in the Catholic Church, that’s just a lie. As Dale Hudson said in his February e-letter:
“The report also broke down the facts regarding the victims — and
this is revealing. Overall, 81% of abuse victims were male, and 78% were at or past the age of puberty. In general, the highest rate of abuse occurred among males aged 11 to 14.In other words, most of the abuse involved gay priests molesting teenage boys. This is called homosexuality, not pedophilia.”
Secondly, although the training did cover how to avoid abuse from church volunteers, it kept running through my mind, “OK, how may church volunteers abused kids in the midst of this scandal? Wasn’t this mainly a problem with the clergy?” I just got the feeling that the whole purpose of the training was to indoctrinate the church volunteers (let’s face it, basically the heart and soul of every parish that keep the lights on and the engine running) into focusing on this as a systemic problem, that no one is trustworthy and let’s just forget what started this whole mess anyway!
OK, so we will all be distracted with doing the follow up Virtus training on line, and getting finger printed, and making sure we have our Virtus documentation, and that we aren’t ever within 5 yards of a kid without someone else being present – and while we’re distracted is anyone doing anything about the big elephant in the room that was the real problem? Why were so many priests seducing and using adolescent males? Where did these priests come from and how do we keep this from happening again? I sure hope my bishop, Bishop Pilla, isn’t so caught up in the minutia of getting is army of volunteers to tow the line that he forgets to crack down on the real problem!! Gee, this is like sealing the crack under the kitchen door to keep the mice out while the roaches are running rampant through the rest of the kitchen!!
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