Good news must be told, says safeguarding expert

The Church has to work harder to let parishioners know the good work that is being done to ensure a safe environment for children, a leading priest-psychologist has said.

Speaking at the first conference of the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland (NBSCCCI), Msgr Stephen Rosetti explained that last year the Church in the United States spent $43 million on child abuse prevention and education. Describing this as “the most effective, extensive, and expensive child protection programme of any organisation in that country,” Msgr Rosetti said similar stories can be told of the Church elsewhere.

“This is a story that needs to be heard,” said Msgr Rosetti, a professor at the Catholic University of America, because “if society wants to prevent child abuse, the public needs to know what to support and fund throughout its institutions, as well as what to condemn.”

Speaking in Athlone to an audience of about 200 delegates, including lay people, bishops, and religious superiors, Msgr Rosetti lamented how the Church has tended to be “priest-centred” and cited Chicago’s Archbishop Blase Cupich as saying “If we always put the child at the centre of the conversation, then we can’t go wrong.”  

Msgr Rosetti also stressed the importance of maintaining a ‘zero tolerance’ policy in dealing with clerical abusers. 

While he said clinical relapse rates for treated offenders were low, he said it was “pastorally unacceptable” for offenders to be returned to ministry. “The stakes,” he said, “are too high.”

Noting how Pope Francis has said “there is no place in the Church’s ministry for those who commit these offences”, Msgr Rosetti says it is probably “just a matter of time before this becomes the law of the Church”.

At the conference’s opening address, Archbishop of Armagh Eamon Martin said “we ought never to forget the legacy of betrayal, trauma and shame that abuse has left in its wake,” and that the conference’s discussions needed to be rooted in “a promise that we are now doing everything possible to ensure that the terrible things which happened them in the past shall not happen again.”

Other speakers at the conference included abuse survivor Marie Collins and Msgr Robert Oliver, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.