When the 17 lectors at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Shadyside learned they would have to undergo national criminal background checks to continue reading the Bible aloud at Mass, two quit.
Dr. Mark Stehlik, the lector coordinator, says he doesn’t think the two were hiding anything. They simply resented the intrusion into their privacy and were hurt by the church’s lack of trust, he says.
In 2004 Dr. Stehlik cheerfully submitted to a state background check in order to coach at the parish school. But now he wonders whether expanding the requirement to volunteers with little official interaction with minors is wise or even helpful in preventing child sexual abuse.
“For a community, meaning the Catholic community, that has been built up on the backs of willing parish volunteers, there had better be a really good, verifiable return to justify putting anything onerous in the way of that volunteerism. In my mind, that return is just not there,” said Dr. Stehlik, 49, a father of two and a lector since eighth grade.
“We are paying a huge price for a very small likelihood of something actually happening.”
This isn’t happening just to churches. The American Red Cross is doing something similar to their employees, using a private company which requires you to agree to a rather open ended, intrusive search. My contact is as an amateur radio operator volunteer. By comparison, the government requirement to access emergency communication centers is a far more reasonable background check, primarily through your driver’s license. So far, in order to prevent a mass loss of skilled volunteers, the ARC has decided in most cases that this is sufficient. Ham radio is not a haven for criminals, but we surely are an independent lot, which is what helps to make us so useful.
Caution is a sound and desirable thing where children are involved. However I do feel this is going overboard. Indeed it is unnecessarily intrusive. There is no longer any Federal limitation on criminal background checks (it used to be 7 yrs). Very few states have such limits. What we are seeing is the pendallum swinging too far in the other direction. We need to remember that Christ did not found His Church for the just, but rather for sinners.
Some of those sinners may have a record of their transgressions somewhere. In most cases it would not be anything that could be remotely a source of concern for those legitimately worried about the safety of minors. However it might well be deeply embarrassing and hurtful for someone in their 60’s to have it dug up that he made a mistake in his late teens or early twenties and has a criminal record. This will not serve to draw sinners into the Church. It is much more likely to drive some away.
As a follow up to my above comment, I strongly support a comprehensive background check on anyone likely to have serious contact with minors and certain other sensitive jobs (i.e. police officers etc). But for the vast majority of jobs in or out of the Church there should be a cap on how far back one can go. And there should also be some common sense exercised when determining when any sort of background check is required. Does one need to be fingerprinted to sing in the choir? No. Should one be screened to chant the reading? No. Should one be checked before being appointed treasurer on the Parish Council with access to large amounts of money? Probably.
All of which begs the question… what has become of common sense in our society?
Ad Oreintem,
You are correct. As long as the volunteer is not volunteering for something that would put him/her in direct, unsupervised contact with minors, there should be no reason to conduct a background check.
Case in point: my husband is sort of the technical guy at our church. He runs the sound board for services and is brought in and consulted with for all events or functions involving sound, lighting and audio-visual equipment, including many for events/functions that are for or involve minors. He is also a registered sex offender, something the leadership and, unless they are living under a rock, the general congregant knows. (His `crime` was non-violent, non-victim and just plain stupid – involving `questionable` photos – not obviously illegal, mind you, just questionable – and he unfortunately accepted a plea agreement in order to avoid jail time and due to the inability to pay the private attorney to go to court. He was not told until AFTER he signed the agreement – and then only by his probation officer – that he would have to register as a sex offender. Oh, and this all happened years ago, before he came to Christ.)
He never allows himself to placed in a position that might have even the slightest inappropriate appearance. There is always another adult presence (at our insistance, not the church`s) if there are minors involved.
Our church does background checks for all volunteers who will have direct contact with minors (including me, since I have helped out with two different kids` programs in direct contact with the kids). If our church insisted on doing background checks for everyone – lay readers, music leaders, LEM`s, etc. – I would be hard pressed to continue attending my beloved church. Not because we have anything to hide, but because we precisely have NOT hidden anything and yet the trust factor for all of our volunteers would be undermined for some slim possibility that something might happen.
Kind of like the sex offender registry. It is assumed that all persons on the registry are there because they MIGHT commit another offense in the future. Here is the fallicy with that: a US Dept of Justice Bureau of Statistics report showed that only 5-14% of those who have committed one sexual offence will go on to commit another (one exception, adult males who are predatory and target young males – they have a very high recidivism rate. This report compiles several studies with different results, although all were low – NOT the `95% of all sex offenders will offend again` quote we hear from politicians and main stream media. Also, the sex offender registry in most states includes any number of offences including the violent one`s like rape and child sexual abuse (molestation) but also including so-called Romeo & Juliet cases of consensual sex between teens, people who `mooned` the principal or the local cops and people who, like my husband, have viewed and/or sent photos via email that are not clearly of minors but of someone who MIGHT be under 18…or MIGHT NOT be under 18 – tasteless, immoral and stupid, yes, but, seriously, NOT something that should place a person on the registry. Welcome to the world of knee-jerk, feel-good laws that do absolutely nothing to protect anyone, especially children.
If background checks for all volunteers becomes the norm, then each red flag should be studied case-by-case, individually and in-depth to determine what the actual offence was.
Stepping off my soapbox now. 🙂
All this is beside the point. Yes, standing up at the lectern and reading lessons isn’t the same as teaching CCD to a bunch of little kids in a room with the door closed, but the Catholic Church wasn’t having problems with its laity. It was the priests.
Are they running background checks on the priests?
Yes, of course they are, RoyIII.
Orientem –
I’ve asked myself the same question, about whatever happened to commonsense. In order to excercise common sense, one has to be able to tell the difference between one situation and another. In other words, one has to be able to discriminate. And we can’t have that, now, can we? :long:
This has been standard practice in British Anglican churches for some time (5 years approx?). I now find that unchurched parents bringing their children to church activities ask about the level of criminal records testing volunteers have gone through – not an unreasonable question, I think.
I know that when I started volunteering with the Sunday School program at church, I had to fill out a form for a background check. It’s a pretty basic one — the police look up your record to see if you have any felony convictions — but everyone in the Christian Education program has to go through it. I haven’t heard any complaints; it seems like a reasonable enough requirement. (Also, it’s not automatic that a felony would disqualify you — it would depend on what, and why, and how long ago, and so on; in the end, it would be a judgement call by the priest and the Christian Ed director.)
I agree that extending it to everyone — LEMs, lectors, people in the choir… — seems a bit excessive; but in an age of legal CYA, it might not be a bad idea for the church. As long as it’s administered equitably, and some common sense is applied about what does or does not disqualify someone — and, of course, as long as scrupulous care is taken that nobody’s results get “leaked” — I don’t think I would object.