The following letter was sent by a father to his local diocese. He has offered it for publication and I am only too happy to publish it, because I agree with every word. Having been forced to sit through such trainings myself, I have first-hand experience of what he is speaking about. —PAK
To Our Catholic Leadership and Fellow Catholics, Especially Parents
The following is a letter of protest regarding the mandatory “Safe Environment” training being administered in Catholic catechesis programs across the country. My parish is St. Phillip’s Church in Hope, Kansas, belonging to the Salina diocese. Our community is too small to run its own catechesis, so many families drive to a program that is within the Wichita diocese and hence subject to the VIRTUS program. The Salina diocese utilizes CMGConnect. Since both programs serve the same purpose, stem from the same mentality, and suffer from similar defects, I’ll refer primarily to VIRTUS, since it is by far the most widespread version in the United States.
For those who may not know, VIRTUS involves teaching volunteers and small children lessons on “good touch vs. bad touch” and it amounts to an implicit form of sexual education. On the surface, it purports to protect the children. In reality, it protects “the Church” (here conceived as a legal and financial entity), while simultaneously perpetrating a deep and multifaceted offense against Catholic children and faithful adult volunteers, men in particular, while showing an alarming disregard for the parental role.
We are led to believe that this program is motivated by concern for the children, but a little bit of digging reveals that it was put in place for the sake of insurance policies designed to insulate the diocese from the financial and legal consequences of sexual misbehavior.
All volunteers must endure the training, and then it falls to these poor volunteers to awkwardly administer a version of its content to children of all ages. Parents can opt their children out, but should a parent have to actively intervene to avoid this? Is this not a red flag in itself? Nor does it help to say that most parents do not care or notice. What else would we expect? Parents today are passive by default, so inundated with filth and scandal that it is a miracle if they detect even gross violations of their parental prerogatives. The fact that few object to the program only proves that people today are complacent, desensitized to sexuality, and submissive to authority, which everyone already knows. What really matters is this: If the program is scandalous in principle (in the Thomistic sense), then it is wrong to offer it even when most parents don’t notice.
I am not attempting to argue against safeguarding our children. It is the precise opposite. This is an argument for protection—for a protection that is holistic, organic, personal, moral, and rooted in the natural order. This protest is a declaration that the current diocesan-mandated “Safe Environment” programs are not a solution to boundary violations; they are boundary violations themselves. They address the so-called “sex abuse crisis” by sexualizing children in a different, albeit far more subtle, manner.
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