By Carol Glatz
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — When Drew
Dillingham packs his bags after spending the past five months in
Rome, he will head back to Washington, D.C., with a unique diploma
and added insight into ways the church can continually improve on its
duty to protect children from abuse.
While the intensive semester-long
course was taught by experts in the fields of psychology, canon law,
and theology, much of the learning also came from having 24
classmates — priests, religious and lay men and women working in the
field of safeguarding minors — who came from 18 different countries,
Dillingham told Catholic News Service June 7.
So, for example, he said, many students
from developing countries are also dealing with the crimes and
scandal of children being forced into war, slave labor, marriage and
prostitution. “So child sexual abuse by clergy is just one of
the many issues that they’re combating,” he said.
Their efforts and experiences, he said,
made him wonder “how else can the church expand its ministry”
so that everything the church has learned from the clergy sexual
abuse crisis can be used “to provide pastoral care to these
other victims of other heinous crimes and sins.”
Dillingham is the coordinator for
resources and special projects at the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops’ Child and Youth Protection Office, helping dioceses work to
keep children safe from abuse and provide needed assistance to
victims.
Aiming to ensure the safeguarding of
minors will remain a top priority for generations to come and to help
train future leaders, the bishops’ conference sent Dillingham to Rome
for intensive studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University’s
specialized degree program in protecting minors.
Created in 2016 to help dioceses,
bishops’ conferences, religious orders and other church bodies
improve child protection efforts, it’s the only interdisciplinary
diploma program of its kind. The program is geared particularly
toward staff from developing nations, Dillingham said, helping them
create and implement protection guidelines, and help them as they
realize “what an important part of church ministry this really
is.”
In the 15 years since the USCCB drafted
its Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and
created the protection office, he said, they are still seeking new
ways to improve based on what they’ve learned since 2002.
The biggest thing many dioceses need,
he said, is to ask, “What can we do better? How can we provide
better assistance and support to victims? How can we look at our past
problems, especially those that have emerged recently in some
dioceses and learn from them? How can we really get to the root cause
of the abuse scandals and eliminate those causes?”
Another need, he said, is to continue
changing the culture that helped deny and hide abuse and protected an
institution over the people who needed help the most.
“Even before 2002, we had policies
and procedures in place, but we didn’t have the culture that said the
safety of children is very important, the support of victims is part
of our core ministry,” he said.
He said the bishops’ conferences are
trying to build that culture not only at the top leadership level,
but also at the local parish level since child protection “is
also the role of the entire church community.”
Dillingham recalled that when the
extent of abuse by clergy in the United States gained nationwide
attention in 2001, he was just 11 years old.
At the time in his parish in his native
Long Island, New York, “there was still silence on this issue so as
a young person, I had no idea that any of this was happening. There
was still this general sense that this was something made up by the
media,” he said.
He said he thinks it has only been
recently that some “people in the church have truly understood
the weight of the situation” and have “really tried to
right the wrongs that have been committed.”
“I think that the way the church
responded in the past was really the wake-up call,” because it
revealed not only the sins of abuse, it also uncovered the “culture
that allowed this sin” to happen — that is, a culture of denial
and secrecy.
The abuse scandal also “made the
church realize that it is a human church. And that the church isn’t
holy because of its members, it’s holy because Christ has sanctified
us and called us to go out and bring his word and bring his healing
to others.”
It also underlined how everyone in the
church needs to “reach out to everyone that needs healing and be
that field hospital that Pope Francis has been describing.”
The diploma program, run by the
Gregorian’s Center for Child Protection, also offers an e-learning
course in six languages; both are meant to complement and implement
Vatican and national mandates so guidelines on safeguarding from the
top turn into effective and decisive action at the local levels.
The national bishops’ conferences,
dioceses and religious orders that are enrolling students in these
programs show how they understand the grass-roots level also must have
the right skills and culture in order to properly implement policies
and guidelines and provide assistance.
Dillingham said something that emerged
during his studies in Rome is that “we have been talking about
child protection in such a negative way. We’ve been saying, ‘Don’t do
this, don’t behave that way.’ We just have a list of don’ts” and
things to avoid.
This has affected him as a CCD teacher
for grade-schoolers because “if a child wants to show me
affection, I almost feel hesitant to show that affection back.”
“The question now is how can we
protect children in a positive way, how can we create loving,
Christian, appropriate relationships with children,” he said.
Priestly formation also should have
added emphasis on how ministering to youth and safeguarding go
together “to make sure that they’re at the center of the room
and protect them that way.”
– – –
Editor’s note: Dillingham was a guest
blogger for CNS this semester, providing 14 posts for a series
dedicated to protecting children.
https://cnsblog.wordpress.com/category/protecting-children-blog/
– – –
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