SOUTH CAROLINA
SC Now
BY MELISSA ROLLINS Morning News mrollins@florencenews.com
FLORENCE, S.C. — In the early 2000s, the Catholic Church faced many allegations against its priests. After that time, a required program was instituted to try prevent abuse from happening again.
Bonnie Sigers, safe environment manager for the Diocese of Charleston, which includes St. Anne and St. Anthony locally, said the program has been in place for a decade now.
“In response to the allegations in 2005, the bishops in the United States created the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” Sigers said. “It outlined what dioceses needed to do to create and maintain safe environments. So we derive our policies from that charter.”
Sigers said all Catholic churches use the charter as a base point for their training. The curriculum used by the Diocese of Charleston is VIRTUS, a program created by The National Catholic Risk Retention Group, Inc.
“All employees and any volunteers that work with children have to go through a background screening, because we have to know all that we can about them,” Sigers said. “They have to attend an education session on how to prevent child sex abuse, have to read and sign a code of conduct for their interactions with children and have to sign-off that they’ve read our policy. All of those things are kept at every parish and school.”
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