COMMENTARY: Software is No Match for Common Sense in Protecting Children

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Unlike many other lawyers, Ralph Yanello seems astonished to find the Catholic Church on his client roster. “If you said to me last year,” he recently told the St. Petersburg Times, that he would be marketing software to do background checks on Catholic Church employees working with children, “I […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Unlike many other lawyers, Ralph Yanello seems astonished to find the Catholic Church on his client roster. “If you said to me last year,” he recently told the St. Petersburg Times, that he would be marketing software to do background checks on Catholic Church employees working with children, “I would have said, `Am I on the same planet?”’

Displaying his wares recently at a meeting of diocesan personnel who monitor those working with children, Yanello exclaimed, “It has opened our eyes to a much larger market.”


But that the official church, battered by sex litigation, is interested in such software raises a question: Can Yanello’s, or any other product, take the place of common sense in deciding who can minister to anyone _ including children?

In the long, tragic haul of this scandal, common sense has been tapped less than the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the crisis of fuel supply.

Common sense is the overall reaction that reasonable human beings have to the people and events in their lives. It is the faculty, according to Aristotle, in which the “various reports of the several senses are reduced to the unity of a common apperception.”

In short, it is the way we come to a judgment not just by thinking about something with our minds but by reading the messages in all the inboxes of our personalities.

We learn a lot about others through the appraisal of our intellects, but we may learn even more from the way they make us feel, the sound of their voices, or their handshakes.

Common sense is our way of combining our impressions into one on which we can act. In selecting church personnel, nothing beats garden-variety common sense. “Trust the authority of your own senses,” wrote Thomas Aquinas.

The danger lies not in trusting too much, but in trusting too little.

Healthy people explain their unfavorable impressions by saying something like, “He just made me feel uncomfortable.” We often explain our regrets by saying, “I knew there was something funny about him,” or, “It just didn’t feel right,” or “Something told me I shouldn’t hire him.”


The “something” is the healthy part of you trying to guide you through the depths and shallows of every day.

If bishops and other officials had trusted their best instincts, instead of overriding their judgments in order to keep up appearances or cover up lapses, they would have avoided the sex-abuse problem that has brought so much suffering to innocent children and so much woe to the church.

In deciding who can minister to the young _ or to any other age group _ the most important thing to find out is whether a candidate can make healthy relationships with other people. That is common sense’s acid test for ministry. It precludes the distracting but unnecessary requirements that, for example, restrict the priesthood to one gender. The only qualification is the ability to relate in a healthy way to other people; common sense can tell if someone can.

Buy the software if you must, but listen to hardheaded common sense at the same time. It will protect the church from engaging child molesters and can steer the latter toward help before they ruin their own lives by ruining those of innocent children.

Good luck to Mr. Yanello, but trust common sense.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE END KENNEDY

To obtain a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.


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