Ever volunteer in a parish? Ever teach in a Catholic school? Ever do either of these things in the past twenty years? Then you get Harvey’s gold star of the day!
You also know about the joys of the “Safe Environment” program. Not familiar? Oh, let’s have a chat…
I recently signed my kids up for a few classes at our parish homeschool co-op and in order to get out of paying an extra fee, I also agreed to supervise “parking lot duty” during one of the morning periods. I put on an orange traffic vest and hold a clip board. Nothing looks more manly, trust me.
Where it gets interesting is that I am required, per diocesan policy, to take an online module in the Safe Environment program.
I am quite familiar with this garbage, having taught in Catholic schools for years. It’s been a while but I think I can soldier through 45 minutes of nonsense.
But it is nonsense. And for more reasons than just wasting my time.
Safe Environment was hatched by the USCCB at the 2002 Dallas Conference. This is the same conference in which none other than Ted McCarrick stood up and proclaimed “We love God’s children!” Gross. “We need to make sure that we don’t ever have to have a Dallas II or Dallas III, etc.”
What the schmoozing and schmaltzy schlongmeister was actually saying was, and you can all say it with me, “We need to protect ourselves, the bishops, because most of us are queer and we want to keep diddling dudes. So we’re going to hire a marketing firm to come up with a cockamamie ‘program’ that meets some legal requirements enough to COVER OUR ASSES.”
Meanwhile they ignored Richard Sipe. They ignored their own data. They ignored common sense because that kind of logic pointed right back at them. The problem was always with them. They raped post-pubescent boys. They embezzled Church funds to cover their addictions. They moved these predators from parish to parish under the guise that (as the now-dead and judged Rembert Weakland said), “I didn’t know that sexual abuse of children was a crime!”
Get the hell outta here…
Newsflash: ANY sexual contact involving children is a crime AND a mortal sin which is even more significant. You as the shepherds should know this. And you actually did know this.
But they had a program to deal with it! They decided the problem was with the thousands of lay people who gave their time to fill roles as teachers and catechists. Sure, it was us. We were the ones writing the transfer orders for pedo priests. We were the ones actually sodomizing young men. Surely carefully vetting us would make sure that faggot priests and bishops would never faggotize again. That’s it.
But the program? It’s a beaut… the first time I had to watch this garbage I remember cringing. Great Moments in Bad Acting would have been a better title. It was a video featuring horrific acting that portrayed a school teacher taking a kid into a utility closet and then a narrator voiced over the line, “The teacher should have been reported by her principal.” Of course. But they never showed the bishop having anal sex with the seminary candidate at his beach house with the line, “This is the anti-Church, folks. Avoid it at all costs.”
I remember they even appointed Frank Keating, the venerable former governor of Oklahoma to sit on their lay review board to monitor the progress of Safe Environment. Until he quit a year later because he saw through their BS.
The problem is still there. And it will be there until Our Blessed Mother intervenes.
In the meantime I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Everyone just goes along with this pile of horse manure because, well, we have to so we can volunteer at our kids’ school. Oh believe me, I’m going online and taking this course. I’ll answer the inane questions about whether children should be alone with adults at the parish. But I’m also writing a letter to the USCCB to point out that the true question should be whether any of the “adults” running the Church shouldn’t be defrocked and prosecuted.
On a closing note, I remember in the early days of this program, the title of the videos was Protecting God’s Children. My fellow teachers and I always added From God’s Bishops.
St. Bartholomew, pray for us!
Harvey Millican's Blog: Musings of a Trad Dad 