Abusing priests + Protecting bishops = The Third Degree for Lay Volunteers

A Virginia columnist wonders why.

(Problems acknowledged, but I will say that the one case of sexual abuse and the Church with which I had more or less direct knowledge involved a lay volunteer in youth ministry.)

Ripped by sex scandals and revelations of thousands of priests abusing thousands children for decades, the Catholic Church is getting tough.

On parishioners.

The church already requires every employee to be vigorously examined just short of genetic testing. Now even church volunteers are told to turn their head and cough if they have more than casual contact with kids.

Volunteers who deal routinely with minors seem OK with this. They willingly submit in the name of keeping children safe, despite the fact that the real lightning rods haven’t been volunteers, but priests who marauded at will while church heads either didn’t know, knew but didn’t do anything, or knew and covered guilty tracks.

But volunteers at one church in Newport News are hopping mad that their pastor is applying the screening not just to volunteers who come into routine contact with children, but to everyone. If you pull weeds alone in a garden, you’re screened. Sing in the adult choir, screened. Count money in a locked building, screened. Volunteers dropped out in droves.