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22664 Your Excellency: Enclosed are copies of correspondence I sent to Bishop Paul S. Loverde and the Victim Assistance Coordinator of our Diocese of Arlington with regard to the VIRTUS “safe environment” program being implemented in the Diocese of Arlington. Sad to say, the entire approach being taken by the United States bishops depends, not on the teachings of the Church, but on the flawed secular approaches of psychology and sociology. Unfortunately, it is these approaches which contributed to the child sexual abuse crisis in the Church to begin with. Yet the bishops as a body and my own bishop in particular are deflecting attention from the real problems: toleration and even promotion of dissent, recruitment of homosexuals to the seminaries, failure to teach the authentic faith in both adult and child catechetics, bad seminary training, and liturgical abuse. Instead they are developing a massive bureaucratic structure that ignores the foundational problems. Our diocese is planning to train dozens of facilitators to give hundreds of seminars on sexual abuse to parents and employees who work with children in the diocese. Those who work with children will be REQUIRED to attend a seminar EVERY YEAR. As a master catechist, former parochial school teacher, and CCD teacher for many years in this diocese, I can say unequivocally that there has never been such zeal for teaching teachers the fundamentals of the faith as is going into these misguided programs. Your Excellency, we are most grateful for recent documents from the Holy See, particularly Redemptionis Sacramentum. In the name of many parents around the country I beg for a reiteration of Church teachings on the inviolability of the latency period with regard to explicit and graphic sexual teaching even in the home. We also need relief from programs that depend on flawed secular approaches that teach parents and others to violate the modesty of their own children by teaching too much too soon and too graphically. My husband and I pray for you and for our dear Holy Father every day.
May his many sacrifices and sufferings bring about the springtime of evangelization
he speaks of so often. We certainly need it in the United States.
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