We began this series “Safe From Abuse” as a presentation and exploration of a talk given in January 2026 by Fr. Hans Zollner about safeguarding. We have studied Fr. Zollner’s understanding of safeguarding and his insistence that safekeeping is a...
Alex was about 20, a strong young man from a troubled family. His mother, who tried to drown him shortly after he was born, died in a mental asylum. His older brother had been committed to an asylum, where he,...
I am writing this article during Holy Week. I hadn’t planned this, but I can’t think of a more suitable time to ponder the relationship between abuse and safeguarding. We are celebrating the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,...
Recently, the Archdiocese of Detroit mandated fingerprinting of all archdiocesan employees, including clergy, religious, and lay, as well as volunteers who work with children and vulnerable adults. This has been added as an enhanced safeguard to the background checks and...
On May 2nd, 2025, Robert Ferguson, Governor of the State of Washington, signed into law Bill 5375 making it mandatory for Catholic priests and other religious leaders to report “if they have reasonable cause to believe that a child has...
This week I had a wonderful conversation with Sr. Carino Hodder from the The Dominican Sisters of St. Joseph. I first met Sr. Carino when she participated in one of my online workshops about spiritual abuse in the Catholic Church....
Any call to action, no matter how necessary and well-meaning, will devolve into platitudes unless we have some idea of when and how to put it into practice. In his 2019 motu proprio letter Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis...
What do catechizing the faithful and safeguarding them from abuse have in common? Both, the Church teaches, are responsibilities belonging to the entire Catholic community. In his 2019 letter Vos Estis Lux Mundi (“You Are the Light of the World”),...
Mira il tuo popolo, bella Signora, che pien di giubilo oggi ti onora; anch’io festevole, corro ai tuoi piè. O Santa Vergine, prega per me. I spent about half of May traveling in the Central Mediterranean, the part of the...
In response to all the depressing coverage of the sexual abuse crisis we hear, we are naturally driven to ask, “Has anything changed?” There is a sense that cases have declined since the 60s and 70s, but with each new...
