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	Diocese: Screening Accomplished Priests, Workers Have Been Trained, It Says By Eric Moskowitz Concord Monitor [New Hampshire] April 21, 2006 http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060421/REPOSITORY/604210339 The state's Roman Catholic diocese announced yesterday that all priests and most church employees and volunteers who work with children have been screened and trained to protect children from sexual abuse. Church officials released internal statistics less than a month after a state audit found major deficiencies in the diocese's attempts to honor the terms of its 2002 agreement with the attorney general's office. That agreement spared the church unprecedented criminal charges of child endangerment despite decades of protecting sexually abusive priests. Every clergy member, employee and volunteer who works with children had been checked against the state's online sex-offender registry as of April 5, diocese officials said. The church had also completed criminal-records checks on all 237 active priests and deacons, on 95 percent of parish, school and camp employees, and on 75 percent of school and parish volunteers. In addition, all clergy members, 95 percent of employees and 83 percent of volunteers had completed the diocese's "Protecting God's Children" training, a seminar on how to prevent, identify and report abuse or suspected abuse. Those figures are markedly better than statistics from parishes sampled by the auditing firm KPMG during its first audit of church compliance with sex-abuse prevention programs, which Attorney General Kelly Ayotte released March 30. Ayotte cited multiple problems and specifically criticized the failure to perform checks against the sex-offender database, which she called a basic step that can be performed by anyone with an internet connection. She blamed Bishop John McCormack's administration for "a failure to take responsibility" and gave the Diocese of Manchester 30 days to come up with a plan to fix the problems found in the audit or risk legal action. The Rev. Edward Arsenault, the diocese's top official for sexual-abuse matters, said the church would submit a formal response to Ayotte next week. But the diocese's announcement yesterday was not related to the state's audit or the comments from the attorney general, Arsenault said. Rather, church officials wanted to update the public on their progress "for people to have a high degree of confidence" in the diocese's commitment to child safety, he said. "This is not in response to the KPMG report or the attorney general's letter," said Arsenault, the bishop's delegate for ministerial conduct. "This is announcing work that we're doing based on our own internal review. Having said that, whatever numbers that were in the KPMG report or what the attorney general referred to were based on their visits 10 months ago." The diocese operates 117 parishes, 25 schools and two summer camps. In addition to interviews with church officials last year, KPMG reviewed the screening and training records at two parishes, one school and one camp. None of them had perfect compliance. In a sample from one parish, 53 percent of employees and volunteers had attended a "Protecting God's Children" seminar and 16 percent had been checked against the sex-offender registry. The auditors also reviewed all priest files; they found that 4.8 percent lacked criminal-records reviews and 8.4 percent were missing the signed forms by priests acknowledging that they understood the abuse-reporting requirements. The audit also found that the diocese had trained 9,000 employees and volunteers but could not determine how many people missed the training or how many more needed to be trained. Church officials originally hoped to train all personnel by the end of 2004. On March 30, Arsenault said he could not produce a number for the training target: "What I can tell you is that volunteers in parishes change every day. That there are new volunteers, there's people who move, there's people who change. There are 315,000 Catholics in New Hampshire. We have 117 parishes. This is a large project." Yesterday, Arsenault said that the church has trained more than 12,000 people since fall 2001. He said he did not have statistics available March 30, but a subsequent review of central records in Manchester showed that 1,393 active employees and 5,713 volunteers had been trained; the 12,000 figure refers to active and past employees and volunteers, he said. Among people who work with children, 5 percent of employees and 17 percent of volunteers still need to be trained, he said. "I think we've accomplished a lot. And I know the people in the parishes and the schools want this to work," said Arsenault, who called the percentages "very respectable.""Having said that, my goal is 100 percent." The diocese yesterday also identified the new compliance coordinator it hired last month: Mary Ellen D'Intino, a licensed social worker and a parishioner of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Derry. The bishop created the position to assist parishes and schools and to act as a liaison between those institutions and the diocesan administration. The church produced the April 5 statistics to create a framework for D'Intino to start with, Arsenault said. The compliance coordinator has assembled a field-review team and plans to visit all diocesan schools by the end of May. D'Intino and her team will visit and review all parishes by the end of October, Arsenault said. Those reviews will allow the church to confirm the statistics it released yesterday, because those numbers were based on reports from the parishes and schools, Arsenault said. Carolyn Disco, a founding member of New Hampshire Catholics for Moral Leadership, said she wants to see how the church's numbers compare with what KPMG finds in its next audit, expected to begin this summer. "We're always glad to see that there's progress in compliance, but I am more interested in the next state audit's results than in information that they put out, because there's just too much experience that shows they don't deserve full trust," she said. "I'd like to think the figures represent the absolute truth, but I want to hear it from the state auditors." Senior Assistant Attorney General Will Delker said the state received a copy of the statistics from the church yesterday. The attorney general's office had no specific comment on the numbers but will respond after the church submits its formal response to Ayotte's letter, he said.
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