BishopAccountability.org
	Archdiocese Gets Low Marks in Church Audit Anchorage: New Directives to Protect Kids Weren't Followed By Lisa Demer Anchorage Daily News April 25, 2008 http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/386315.html Six years after the scandal of Catholic priest sex abuse broke nationwide, a new audit says most dioceses around the country follow national church directives intended to protect children. The news is not so good in Anchorage. The Anchorage Archdiocese is among only a dozen that fell short among 190 dioceses audited, a March 2008 report says. And it failed to comply in two areas, making it among the dioceses that performed the very worst: It didn't initially report some new allegations to law enforcement, and it didn't do enough training for children, priests and volunteers to ensure a "safe environment" where kids aren't abused, according to the annual report on child protection by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The directives on how to protect children come from a charter drafted in 2002 by the conference of bishops and later revised. The audit results don't mean the Anchorage Archdiocese failed miserably or isn't trying hard to improve its record on protecting children, said Teresa Kettelkamp, who oversees child protection programs for the conference of bishops. She's also a retired colonel with the Illinois State Police. The archdiocese addressed most areas -- reaching out to victims, establishing a review board made up mainly of lay people to advise the archbishop on individual cases, no confidential settlements of abuse cases unless the victim requests it, criminal background checks of clergy, staff members and volunteers who have regular contact with children, and clear standards of behavior for clergy and others. "They had an instance where the auditors felt law enforcement should have been contacted," Kettelkamp said. "Anchorage was right up front with what came to their attention. It's not like we had to find it in a back of a drawer." The Anchorage audit covered Oct. 1, 2005, to June 30, 2007. The allegation was made in 2006 by an Anchorage church worker who "observed behavior of a cleric with youth" that the worker thought violated the pastoral code of conduct, according to Sister Charlotte Davenport, chancellor of the archdiocese. The archdiocese hired a retired law enforcement officer to investigate. The investigator found "boundary violations" but no sexual abuse, and the archdiocesan review board recommended the cleric get extra training, Davenport wrote in an e-mail. Church leaders in Anchorage didn't believe something like that needed to be referred to law enforcement, but during the audit learned that the bishops' Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People required the referral, Davenport said. "And they took care of it right away," Kettelkamp said. The archdiocese has since worked out a reporting procedure with Anchorage police and Alaska State Troopers, Davenport said. The other matter is harder to fix. The bishops' charter requires every diocese to provide training to children, youths, parents, ministers, educators, volunteers and others about how to keep children safe from sexual predators -- how to be on alert for "grooming" by a priest, for instance. Ten dioceses had trouble in this area. The Anchorage Archdiocese thought the public schools were providing information to kids on how to stay safe, but found out that not everyone was getting consistent information, Davenport said. So now it is presenting a program to Catholic children who attend public school, just as it already did for those in its Catholic schools. The Anchorage archdiocese also has struggled to make sure all of its priests and volunteers are trained. Some of the difficulty relates to geography; some to turnover. The archdiocese encompasses 138,985 square miles and includes the Mat-Su, the Kenai Peninsula, Kodiak, Dillingham and Unalaska. Alaska's other two Catholic dioceses, in Fairbanks and Juneau, passed all parts of the audit. The charter requirements and scrutiny since 2002 make a difference in safety for children, Kettelkamp said. If nothing else, nearly 6 million children have been trained in what's OK and what's not as far as relationships with adults. "I think people should take comfort that the church is doing a lot," she said.
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