Ep 05: What is the Church doing to keep kids safe?

This episode contains a description of sexual abuse. Listener discretion is advised. Courtney Chase has worked for the Archdiocese of Washington for more than six years. She's the point person for dealing with cases of clergy sex abuse. My name is Courtney Chase and I'm the Executive Director of the Office of Child Protection and Safe Environment for the Archdiocese of Washington. In that time, Chase has faced only one case of a priest in active ministry being accused of child sexual abuse. It happened in 2018. I got a call from the police that I work with frequently working with the handling of these cases. I had just dropped off a carpool in the morning but he had called to sit. I just wanted to give you a heads up. A report was made on our hotline. And I will let you know when I get the report, I'll let you know what it is. So the police sent me the report. I notified it was Munsegier at the time. He notified Cardinal World and the clergy was brought in and faculties were removed immediately. That same day? Yeah, that same day. Here's the backstory. In 2014, Capuchin father Urbano Vasquez arrived at the shrine of the Sacred Heart in Washington, DC. He was friendly and well liked by the largely salvedorian community. About a year later, the mother of a 13-year-old girl told father Moises Vialta, Sacred Heart's pastor, that Vasquez had reached under her daughter's shirt to touch her breast. More reports followed, kissing and groping a 9-year-old girl. Rubbing a teenager's leg during confession, once a mother caught Vasquez kissing her 16-year-old daughter on the lips in the church dining room, Vasquez claimed he didn't know what came over him. The mother reported this to the parish, twice. It wasn't until 2018, three years after Vialta received the first report, that the abuse was reported to the authorities. And the pastor came in and there was information where a report had been made earlier, like a couple of years earlier, and his faculties were removed for a failure to report. Chase told me that the family of the girl who was abused in 2015 had asked Vialta not to go to the civil authorities. So, you know, we were able to, at that point, say it doesn't mean to all pastors. Like, it doesn't matter what your community says to, you know, your community members say to you if someone comes and discloses abuse to you, regards if they say, "No, we don't want you to move forward. You are a mandated reporter, and you have to act in accordance to the policy and the law." So both father Vasquez and father Vialta were placed on leave, and so was the child protection coordinator at the parish. So the community lost two clergy members in one weekend, and the poor capuchin that was left there did all the masses and covered for the community. And God bless them because, you know, that almost put him under. He was so stressed out. After a police investigation, father Vasquez was arrested. So communication went immediately to the sacred her community, and what happened is once the letter went the next day, a young minor came to the school and reported to the council, that she had been abused. And so I called the police immediately, and the detectives immediately went over and interviewed the student. And then it went, our policy went in, again, into effect, communications went sent to the school. There were multiple community meetings with parents, parish boards, parish staff, community members. I know that our secretary of social concerns and communication met many times with the sacred her community. The sacred her community was sharply divided by these allegations. Some people didn't believe the girls. They liked father Vasquez, and father Vialto was a pillar of the community, but things were in motion. It went to trial. It was a two week trial, and it was in August. Father Vasquez was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The church did a lot of things right in this story, but the one thing it did wrong happens to be the most important thing, taking immediate action after the first accusation of abuse. Father Vialto didn't tell anyone about Vasquez for three years. By then, at least two other girls had been abused. You're listening to Crisis, "Clarge you abuse in the Catholic Church." I'm Carna La Soya. In this episode, we're asking the question, what is the church doing now to keep kids safe? In 2002, the American bishops met in Dallas to draft new policies and reforms addressing the sexual abuse crisis. The result was the charter for the protection of children and young people, known in Catholic circles as the Dallas Charter. We're going to take a closer look at the charter, what it says, some of the debates surrounding it, and how it's working. The U.S. bishops established the Secretaryate of Child and Youth Protection in 2002. Its job is to help keep kids safe at church. At its helm is Deacon Bernie Noh Hedera. He's a guy with a lot of good things to say about how much the church has done to prevent sex abuse within its ranks. I asked if he could break down the Dallas Charter for us. So if you want to take it simply, the charter is basically a road map. For dioceses to carry out efforts endeavors to make sure children are safe, that there's outreach for victims, education and background checks in place for anyone who has access to children or vulnerable individuals, and then a means to somehow try to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future. The charter is a living document. It's already been revised three times. The charter's 17 articles cover a wide range of policies, including how to reach out to victims of abuse, respond to allegations, work with civil authorities, discipline offenders, and generally maintain a safe environment in the diocese. There's another document called the Essential Norms. The norms give elements of the charter the force of canon law, for the purposes of this podcast, we'll just say the charter to refer to both documents, and we'll focus only on the reforms geared toward the prevention of abuse. I asked Noha Dara what the most significant new reform of the Dallas Charter was. He said zero tolerance. That language that came about particularly with article five of the charter pointed out very clearly that for even one instance of this allegation proven to be credible could be possible grounds for dismissal from the clerical state. It made it very clear that such behavior, such actions will not be tolerated in the U.S. Church. This was a difficult decision for the bishops to make. When the 2002 crisis broke in the U.S., the idea of taking a priest out of ministry, even if there was only one allegation on his record 20 years ago, was considered drastic. The committee got together and they said that zero tolerance was not on the table in the beginning. My senior Steven Rosetti is a licensed psychologist and professor at the Catholic University of America. He was also part of the group that drafted the Dallas Charter. And finally, after this arduous process, the bishops finally realized that one strike in your out. Regardless of how well he did in treatment, regardless of how low the risk was and that the chance and regardless of what kind of ministry you could put him in a ministry with no children and supervising him, his chance to relapse would be almost zero. Nonetheless, the bishops realized that the pastor he's speaking they couldn't put him back in that. That was a very tough transition and convergent, if you will. We are actually the only country, believe it or not, that it has an explicit zero tolerance policy. So it's not the position to only see or in almost every country in the world that one strike in your out. It's only specifically in the United States that does this. This is a point worth emphasizing zero tolerance is reform that was not just unusual in the church for the time, but 20 years later, the US is the only country where the church has an explicit zero tolerance policy. There is one simple starting point to prevent child abuse in an institutional context background checks. The Dallas Charter mandates background checks for anyone who has regular contact with minors through the church. So that means all clergy, teachers, staff at schools, youth ministers, even just occasional volunteers in any setting where there are kids. In 2019, compliance with the background check process was 98.7% for priests. In addition, more than two million background checks were done on volunteers that year alone. all dioceses do background checks in the same way. This is how the archdiocese of Washington does them. Every individual that has contact with children needs to get a FBI background check, which is a fingerprinting, Courtney Chase. It allows for an ongoing check of individuals, which means that if somebody does something which I know most people don't, but if somebody does have an infraction or a problem with the law if they're arrested or processed, our office gets an alert, but notifying us that that person has been arrested. Anybody who has had, who's been charged with any sort of child maltreatment is disqualified from working or volunteering with children. We have a zero tolerance and it is something that we want to make sure we follow so the community feels that anybody who has contact with children through the archdiocese whether it be school or parish or a church who's working there will be safe and has been cleared. Eileen Dombal, associate professor and assistant dean of social work at Catholic University notes that the church is far ahead of many other institutions when it comes to addressing sex abuse among their employees. Sexual abuse is not just a Catholic church problem. Sexual abuse is a societal problem and we have to intervene on all levels in society. So we have government, you know federal government, state government, local government services that don't require background checks or don't require screenings. They are not policies like the simpleys for reporting and things like that. So a lot of our other institutions have a long way to go in being trauma informed and responding and taking responsibility as a system for ignoring, denying or covering up abuse. For example, the Catholic church started requiring background checks on all volunteers in 2002. The Boy Scouts also began background checks the next year, but only on new volunteers. It wasn't until 2008 that they required volunteers already serving to be checked. Even more concerning is the fact that to this day there are no federal regulations on background checks for public school employees. The rules changed depending on the state. In 2016, USA Today did an in-depth look at state regulations and found that teachers who lost their teaching licenses due to documented sexual misconduct or child abuse were able to move and teach in other states. Along with background checks, the Dallas Charter mandates that clergy, employees, and volunteers go through something called safe environment training. This training is meant to teach people how to identify signs that abuse is happening, especially signs of grooming. It sets out simple rules to follow that will cut down the chances that abuse could take place. So in the Archdiocese of Washington, we use the vertus training and there are all sorts of issues of how to spot someone who is grooming a child, how to ensure that an adult is not left alone with a child. Eileen Dombo. Making sure that there are two volunteers at a time working with a child or how to understand safety and boundaries with children. When I say child, I mean a minor. So this could be a 17-year-old. You don't bring them in your car to drive them somewhere by yourself. You can't text with a minor without another adult or a parent on that text. So just sort of thinking about boundaries. It's very specific. How about Facebook and social media? Are there policies on how you can interact with minors? Correct. So any interaction using technology or social media has to be related to church business, so the youth group meeting, youth ministry, and it has to include again an adult who's been through the training or is somehow working for that church or the end or their parent. It's always best practice actually to have the parent in on all that as well. The training also encourages parents to have an open communication with their children and to pay attention if something seems off. Whenever a child is trying to tell you they're not comfortable with someone, pay attention to that. According to the US Bishops Annual Report in 2019, more than 264,000 employees, 170,000 educators, and two million volunteers were trained through safe environment programs. The main takeaway is that if you see something or you're suspicious of something, you have to report it. Courtney Chase, everybody that works in our diocese both volunteer or just a member is a mandated reporter, which means that if they suspect any sort of abuse, whether it's physical neglect or sex abuse, they are mandated by the child protection policy to report it. Chase said that there's also safe environment training for children. These lessons begin in kindergarten. Child sex abuse does not discriminate and so we want to make sure that all the children in the diocese that are in religious ed programs or in the schools have the same education that they're all on the equal playing field so they are able to identify problematic behavior accordingly. The Dallas Charter also required bishops to establish diocesan review boards to advise them on how to handle allegations of abuse. I think overall the boards work very well and because they're made up of lay people and not employees of the church aside from the one clergy member, Eileen Dombos on the Archdiocesan Review Board in Washington, DC. They don't work for the church, so being outside of the system it allows a great deal of independence and so I think as long as the people who are appointed to the boards are doing their job, which I think most are, it works the works very well. In the next episode we're going to go in depth regarding the process of what happens when an allegation is made. So for now I just asked Dombos some basic questions like who's on the review board? And so on our board we have a former chief of police. We have someone who a social worker who's done child abuse investigations. We have someone who's been abused by clergy themselves and they are very very helpful in these case reviews to say yes this is consistent with the experience of someone who's been abused. In the Archdiocese of Washington the review board is made up of seven people. They are all volunteers appointed by the Archbishop. After reviewing all the information and files about an allegation the review board gives their recommendation to the Archbishop as to whether the person should remain in ministry. So we meet quarterly and he comes to the meetings and reports back to us about hairier recommendations, here's what I'm doing, he's very much present and in touch. The charter has a certain ambiguity in it about review boards. The boards are supposed to meet regularly but what regularly means seems to be an open question. Actually there's a lot about the Dallas charter that's ambiguous with the 195 US diocese blood by bishops who answered to the Pope alone. The drafters of the charter knew that a flexible open-ended document was their best option. This brings me to the question how is the charter implemented throughout the church and how do they know it's working? We'll answer that question after the break. That long summer of 2018 following the revelation surrounding Cardinal McCarrick and the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report the lady directed much of their anger right at the bishops. In November at the bishops' semiannual meeting, Francesco Cesareo, a layman, channeled what many Catholics in the US were feeling into an hour-long address to the leaders of the church. He was direct. It is shameful that the sin of abuse was hidden and allowed to fester until uncovered by the secular world. Even more unbearable is the fact that so many innocent children and young people suffered because of the inaction and the silence of some bishops. You must put the victims first when allegations come forward. How many souls have been lost because of this crisis? Today the faithful and the clergy do not trust many of you. They are angry and frustrated. No longer satisfied with words and even with prayer. They seek action that signals a cultural change from the leadership of the church. Church. While most of you have responded appropriately to allegations of abuse, according to a recent report by the Boston Globe in Philadelphia Enquirer, more than 130 bishops, or nearly one-third of those still living, have been accused during their careers of failing to respond to sexual misconduct in their dioceses. Others have been accused of committing abuse. Few have faced real consequences. This must change. So who's this guy who speaks to bishops like this? Chizarello was the chairman of the National Review Board for the eight years leading up to that meeting. The review board was established by the charter and serves as an advisory council for the bishops on child protection issues. It's similar to the archdiocesan review boards, except that their focus is more on issues and not so much looking at specific cases. In other words, Chizarello's job was to be the guy who tells the bishops the unflinching truth about the sex abuse crisis. I asked Chizarello how the bishops reacted to his comments. I think that they were shocked by the frankness of that address. And I really felt that at that moment that that was a moment where frankness and laying out the truth and having the courage to say it needed to be said. Otherwise, the National Review Board's voice would be compromised and that our role would be compromised. I knew that it would probably not be well received by some of the bishops. I know that for certain, just from personal feedback, but I also know that some bishops did appreciate that frankness and that challenge and indicate to me that what I said needed to be said in that very public forum. Chizarello does have a lot to say about the shortcomings of the implementation of the dollar's charter. There are not black and white prescriptive measures in the charter. They're guidelines. And so it's left up to each individual bishop based on the fact that a bishop is autonomous within his own diocese to implement the charter or to interpret the charter as he understands the charter. And so as a result of that ambiguity, you have lots of variation across the United States. For example, the charter says that you have to have a safe environment program, but it doesn't say what the program should contain or how it should be conducted. So we've seen examples of safe environment programs that are homegrown that are no more than an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper with some information that goes home with the child and asks the parent to sign, read it and sign off on it. That's the program. And then there are discrepancies in how the review boards operate. So in audits, we have found that in some dioceses, the diocesan review board is meeting once a month or every quarter. And some dioceses, it is only meeting twice a year and some only once a year. And in some dioceses, the review board doesn't meet unless there's a case. This is obviously not ideal since you would want the board to know and trust one another enough to handle cases appropriately when they do come up. But a diocesan review board is not only there to examine cases of alleged sexual abuse by a cleric. What the Diaspora review board should be doing is looking at the policies of a particular diocese, making sure those policies are updated, that those policies are effective. They should be spending time looking at case studies and how other dioceses have responded to situations that emerge so that if a situation emerges in their diocese, they have some background from which to draw. The National Review Board oversees an audit every year, assessing how well the diocese are following the policies, how many allegations of abuse were made, and what was done about them. The audit is conducted by a third party firm. The audit's effectiveness is something that Chesareo has concerns about. It's an audit that has minimal bottom lines in order to, quote unquote, pass the audit. So it's not difficult to pass the audit because the standard for passing the audit is quite minimal and quite low. So in 2018, when the macaric situation emerged, a lot of people asked and then shortly thereafter the Pennsylvania Grand jury report, a lot of people asked, how could these dioceses have passed the audit if all of these problems came to light? The reason they could pass the audit is because the audit audits to the charter and the charter is not prescriptive and it has a great deal of ambiguity that leaves room for interpretation. And so one could be compliant with the charter, but that might not get to some deep rooted or systemic problems that need to be addressed. And I think that the 2018 brought that to light as well. Chesareo recommends that that part of the audit be strengthened. It should not be checklists, checkmark, I'm okay. The focus has to be how do I create a culture of safety? How do I change the mindset of those in the dice, clergy, employees? So just like hospitals, for example, you have all these policies and protocols in place and still something goes wrong. What does the hospital do? They really they begin immediately to do a root cause analysis. What happened in this case? All the policies were there. The policies were followed, yet we still had this accident or we still had this patient die. What went wrong? Where's the loophole? Chesareo's comments may be think of the father Vasquez case from the top of the episode. Once the abuse allegations had been reported to the archdiocese, everything happened the way it was supposed to happen. Yet it still took three years for the pastor to report the abuse, because he thought that by following the preference of the family to keep it quiet, he was doing the right thing. When the archdiocese learned this, Courtney Chase told me, they made another effort to communicate again to all the pastors about their role as mandated reporters. While it might seem disappointing that in 2015 a pastor didn't understand his role as a mandated reporter, the reality is that a process is in place. Despite some failures, the process was ultimately able to rectify itself and remove the priest. So far in this episode, we've covered a lot of the methods that the church adopted in 2002 to keep kids safe. Background checks, safe environment training, review boards, and an annual audit. But there's one aspect of child protection that didn't seem to change at all in 2002. And that's Bishop's accountability. The charter is silent on accountability of bishops. In fact, the charter did not apply to bishops. It applied to clergy, but it did not apply specifically to bishops. So that was a one big problem. That wasn't an oversight. It was on purpose. Here's a moment from the June 2002 meeting, when then Bishop William Laurie. Now the Archbishop of Baltimore answers a question from then Archbishop Alden Curtis of Omaha. Just for clarification, you say cleric, priest, deacon, bishops are also clerics. We decided that we but limited to priest or deacon as the the the disciplining of a bishop is beyond the purview of this document. Cleric, but cover all three. So we decided not to use the bird cleric. Okay, so it applies to priests and deacons. There's a straightforward answer for why the bishops weren't included in the Dallas charter. According to Canon Law, the only ecclesial authority who can discipline a bishop is the pope. And even then, there are limits. Therefore, the Dallas charter couldn't discipline bishops who covered up for priest abusers or who themselves may have been abusers. Instead, the bishops drafted a statement of a piscable commitment, pledging that they would take responsibility for their role in this hexabuse crisis and hold themselves accountable. But several of the bishops thought that even this statement was too weak, not clear enough that the bishops themselves had failed in many ways. Later that year, these bishops offered amendments to the text during a meeting in Washington, D.C. It is extremely important that we not only talk about the future and what we are going to do, but acknowledge and squarely accept responsibility for what has happened in the past. I think if we don't do that in this document, we simply delay that process. And as our Bishop Brunette said, our people are asking that question. The late Bishop George Murray, who at the time was the Bishop of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I think we have an opportunity before us now, which we need to seize to work into this document, a clear acknowledgement that mistakes have been made and an acceptance of responsibility for that. And I think until we do that, we cannot move forward with any sense of integrity. Bishop Murray's comments proved to be true decades after he spoke them. The reckoning that followed in 2018 led the Church to take two major steps toward Bishop's accountability. First, Pope Francis implemented reforms in a document titled "Vos Estes Luke's Moondy" that holds bishops and religious superiors accountable for their actions. And second, the U.S. bishops approved a third party reporting system for allegations against themselves. And I think that this third party reporting system that has been established is a first step in that direction, whereby there is a body that will examine any allegations brought against a bishop and then quickly bring that to Rome for adjudication or for a decision. Given everything that we've heard in this episode, I pose this question to Chesarel. Are kids safe at church today? So I would say that children are safe in the church today, because the church is really one of the few, and I would say probably the leading institution that has taken such a proactive approach to dealing with this issue and putting in place policies and protocols to ensure that children are safe. What does that mean? Does that mean that there will be absolutely zero cases of abuse going forward? I don't think that that's a realistic expectation, because we know that the abuse of minors is not a church-only problem, but it is a societal problem, and that there will still continue to be cases, unfortunately. However, the number of those cases will be few and far between. The numbers seem to agree with this claim. Substantiated allegations of abuse by current minors have been in the single digits for at least seven years, but cases of sexual abuse were already falling before 2002. As we learned in episode three, the pattern of abuse in the church correlated with the social and cultural changes of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. We can't know for sure what the Dallas reforms were responsible for versus other factors. The charter is just, it's simply a document. Deacon Bernie, no hadara. That has to take place as there has to be a change of culture, a change of heart. There has to be a mindfulness and a realization that the protection of children does not fall on the shoulders of just a certain few people or just the staff members of offices for protection. The protection of our children falls on the shoulder of all the whole community, the community at large. This is who we are. We protect our vulnerable and we accompany those who have been abused. You know, if there's this belief or understanding, well, we have the charter and we've passed the audit and whatever, we're checking off the boxes and to have that mentality thinking, okay, we're fine, it wouldn't happen here. I would be very careful of having that kind of attitude. There has to be a vigilance that is always in place. Next week on crisis, we'll explore what happens when an abuse allegation is made and the different roles of canon and civil law and pursuing justice. We'll hear from the canonist and investigator at the Archdiocese of Minneapolis, St. Paul and a former Assistant District Attorney from Baton Rouge. In the Catholic project at the Catholic University of America, your listening to crisis, our podcast team includes myself, Colonel DeZoya, executive producer Steven White, producer Jeff Gosser, and communications manager and writer Sarah Perla, sound designed by Paul Vikekis, music courtesy of Jay Tibbett's and APM Music, archival footage courtesy of the USCCB and C-SPAN, our theme song was composed by Gautham Shrikashan, marketing and distribution provided by Jeff Umbro of the Podglamoretth, cover art by Tom Grillo and a very special thank you to all of our guests. For an episode guide or for more information about the Catholic project, go to thecathacproject.org. If you've been sexually assaulted, you can receive confidential support 24/7 through the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-Hope. That's 1-800-656-4673. If the abuse is related to the Catholic Church, you can also contact your diocese victim assistance coordinator. Contact information for each diocese is available at usccb.org/vac.