Bishop Robert Vasa

10/06/2005

BEND — Sunday was, to say the least, a rather unusual day. Due to Saturday commitments I began my Sunday trip from Bend to Hermiston at 3 a.m.

The trip to Hermiston was peaceful and blessedly uneventful. I arrived in ample time for the 8 a.m. Mass. The Gospel of the tenants in the vineyard provided an opportunity to talk about Stewardship and to extend that to a stewardship of life and Catholic faith. As the Lord asked what the owner of the vineyard would do when he came back to his vineyard to find it ill-kept and unfruitful, so the Lord of our particular harvest will likewise ask each of us, who are tenants of His gracious gifts, what kind of harvest we have produced. I sincerely hope the Lord does not hold us accountable for the harvest of aborted babies that our country produces each year, or the harvest of abused children, or the harvest of pornography, or the harvest of more and more permissive judicial rulings, or the harvest of anti-life legislative actions.

Unfortunately many of these things are harvests in which even Catholics have a passive or even an active part. The Gospel challenges each of us to ask of and for ourselves what part we have played in promoting these harvests or what part we have failed to play in diminishing them.

I asked for and committed myself to seek a threefold harvest from and for the Diocese of Baker. The first is priestly and religious vocations from among our own young men and women to serve in the Diocese. The second is a harvest of evangelization, an evangelized Catholic laity and an evangelizing Catholic laity. The third is a harvest of Catholic adults imbued with a deep and solid understanding of the complete package of Catholic teaching as presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As I explained at Mass, this does not mean that I have no passion for youth and child protection or for life issues or for CCD or for Catholic schools, but rather that I hope the promotion and pursuit of these three harvests will also, almost automatically, entail a fruitful harvest in all the others as well. I pray it is so.

The day continued with a repeat of the message at the 11:30 a.m. Mass followed by a potluck lunch and an hourlong presentation at the parish on life issues. This date and topic were chosen because of Respect Life Sunday, which I regretfully did not promote with the zeal the topic deserves. I hope, during that brief hour, I was able to touch on at least some of the life issues that seemed to need clarification. At each of these three events, I was most edified by the interest and attentiveness of the participants. Anytime I travel to parishes, I sense a genuine hunger and thirst for challenging “meat and potatoes” presentations of the faith — thus my commitment to adult education as one very important component of the diocesan harvest.

The life issues presentation was followed immediately by a partial participation in the local Life Chain event from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Because of a need to meet with some members of the parish staff, I had to leave the chain a few minutes early so as to be able to finish the meeting before traveling to Pendleton for a 5:30 p.m. presentation on the revision of diocesan statutes and policies.

Leaving Hermiston about 10 minutes later than I should have meant a bit more rushed trip to Pendleton and an arrival 10 minutes after the presentation was scheduled to have begun. Nevertheless, the essential material was covered without extending the scheduled ending time. The 9 p.m. supper was great, and then an hour or more of conversation brought me close to midnight and the end of an atypically long but very rewarding and exhilarating day. At the end, I was tired.

The next topic is one that I bring up only with great reluctance for I do not want to give any appearance whatsoever of being soft on my desire to assure the complete safety and protection of children. The Charter for the Protection of Children has been interpreted to include mandatory “safe-environment training” for all children of or connected with the Church. In the diocese, we have indicated that such training must be made available to all children under our supervision in our Catholic schools but have not taken on the nearly impossible task of assuming responsibility for every child in the diocese.

As a result of this discrepancy between a new interpretation of the charter and our diocesan policy, the annual charter audit will undoubtedly find the Diocese of Baker, and me as bishop, “Not in Compliance” and will issue a “Required Action,” which I am prepared, at this point, to ignore. I say this not because I resist efforts to protect children, but rather precisely the opposite. There are a series of questions that I believe need to be answered before I could mandate such a diocesan-wide program of “safe-environment training.”

A few such questions follow: Are such programs effective? Do such programs impose an unduly burdensome responsibility on very young children to protect themselves rather than insisting that parents take such training and take on the primary responsibility for protecting their children? Where do these programs come from? Is it true that Planned Parenthood has a hand or at least huge influence on many of them? Is it true that other groups, actively promoting early sexual activity for children, promote these programs in association with their own perverse agendas? Do such programs involve, even tangentially, the sexualization of children, which is precisely a part of the societal evil we are striving to combat? Does such a program invade the Church-guaranteed-right of parents over the education of their children in sexual matters? Do I have the right to mandate such programs and demand that parents sign a document proving that they choose to exercise their right not to have their child involved? Do such programs introduce children to sex-related issues at age-inappropriate times? Would such programs generate a fruitful spiritual harvest? Would unsatisfactory answers to any of the questions above give sufficient reason to resist such programs?

There are many concerned parents who have indicated to me that the answers to all of these questions are unsatisfactory. If this is true, do these multiple problematic answers provide sufficient reason to resist the charter interpretation? At very least, even the possible unsatisfactory answers to any of the questions above leaves me unwilling and possibly even unable to expose the children of the diocese to harm under the guise of trying to protect them from harm. I pray that, in this, I am neither wrong-headed nor wrong.

For holding to this conviction I and the diocese may be declared negligent, weighed and found wanting.