ATLANTA (GA)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Written by Ann Rodgers
Summer meetings of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops tend to be rather slow and newsless — so much so that I rarely cover them. But this year’s June meeting in Atlanta was so packed with news on Wednesday that reporters couldn’t even get summaries of it all into their stories.
The Post-Gazette, therefore, opted to cover their plan to write a letter about jobs and the economy, and their 10-year review of their child protection charter for Thursday’s paper, and make the religious freedom story wait a day so we could give it decent space in Friday’s paper.
But there are always interesting moments at the bishop’s conference that don’t get into my stories, either because they’re more inside baseball than news or because they require so much explanation that I can’t justify the space. So while I’m waiting in the Atlanta airport I’m going to go through my notes and put down as many of those odds-and-ends as I can before my flight for Pittsburgh boards. …
In an address to the bishops on the 10th anniversary of their child protection charter, Al Notzon, the Texas layman who chairs the National Review Board that oversees their response to allegations, spoke of issues they must address in the future.
One difficult area is “boundary violations” that don’t amount to sexual abuse but can appear suspicious, either rightly or wrongly. In some cases they can be “grooming behavior,” a prelude to sexual abuse of a minor. In other cases they may be entirely innocent, he said, citing the example of a priest who tickles a baby that he is holding in his lap.
Reports of boundary violations are increasing, he said, saying that the psychologists and pediatricians who serve on his committee consider them a “murky area” for action.
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