c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The new movie “Doubt” sent me back to childhood and my time as a student in Catholic elementary school in upstate New York in the late 1950s.

Playwright John Patrick Shanley penned the award-winning play and directed the subsequent movie. As an alumnus of a Catholic school in the Bronx, he is well-suited to capture the ethos of the Catholic schools and parishes that spawned many talented people today such as himself.

At the time Shanley graced their classrooms, Catholic schools were well-known as providing prep-school quality education for poor and middle-class youth. The youth, of course, never knew they were considered poor or middle class. The nuns, brothers and priests who staffed those schools demanded that students strive for excellence _ after all, they drove into you that you were working for God Himself. Catholic guilt notwithstanding, who was going to let Him down?

Shanley might not have been the superb writer he is today without some Catholic nun drilling him over and over again on matters of spelling, grammar, vocabulary and syntax. Perhaps that’s why he develops the fictitious character of Sister Mary James based on Sister Margaret McEntee, his real-life first grade teacher (played in the film by Amy Adams) who still teaches in a Catholic school in New York City.

What neither Sister McEntee nor I (nor probably Mr. Shanley) knew in the 1950s was that child sexual abuse by clergy existed. McEntee, in fact, recently said that while the portrait of religious life back then is real, the plot’s incident of child sexual abuse is not.

The church is no longer ignorant of sexual abuse. Ever since 2002, when awareness of the extent of the clergy sexual abuse scandal shook the church to its core, U.S. bishops have launched an aggressive, expensive and unrelenting campaign to guarantee that Catholic parishes, schools, religious education and other programs will be safe environments for children.

Between 2003 and 2008, the Catholic Church in the United States, through concentrated and determined effort, has:

_ Trained more than 1.8 million clergy, employees, and volunteers in parishes in how to create safe environments and prevent child sexual abuse.

_ Prepared more than 5.8 million children to recognize abuse and protect themselves.

_ Run criminal background checks on more than 1.5 million volunteers and employees, 162,700 educators, 51,000 clerics and 4,955 candidates for the priesthood.

If only such programs had been in effect from the beginning. Thankfully, after tremendous effort and persistent training, a child today is perhaps safer on a Catholic campus than in many other settings.

In “Doubt,” the fictional character Father Flynn (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) meets, presumably alone, with young Donald. When the priest is questioned, he initially refuses to tell the principal the purpose of the meeting. Today, under the church’s safe environment programs, this should never happen; the priest would not arrange to meet alone with the boy at all. Priests, teachers and principals are all trained to ensure that children always remain in a safe environment. And the child is well trained to identify situations in which he or she feels uncomfortable.

“Doubt,” in fact, is not about sexual abuse by clerics as much as it is a study in how we deal with suspicions and questions in our own minds when we lack absolute proof.

When it comes to child sexual abuse, there is no doubt that people have to act responsibly _ even while knowing that any program, no matter how rigorously implemented, cannot provide 100 percent assurance. Safe environment programs are designed so that predators do not make it onto a church property, but even if they do, they will be more quickly and easily identified. There will be no concealment, and any suspicious behavior will be reported to civil and church authorities immediately.

The Catholic Church’s response to child sexual abuse by clergy includes the provision that the church provide counseling and other assistance to heal people who were hurt in the past. Most importantly, however, it means the church has created an environment where child sexual abuse is unlikely to occur again. Of that there is no doubt.

(Sister Mary Ann Walsh is director of media relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.)

KRE DEA END WALSH