AFP: "Catholic coloring book warns US kids of pedophile priests"

AFP:

New York's Roman Catholic Church is trying a novel approach to alert children to the danger of being sexually assaulted by a priest, with an abuse-themed coloring book, officials said Tuesday.

"Being Friends, Being Safe, Being Catholic," was distributed earlier this year to several hundred schools in the New York area as part of the church's Safe Environment Program, a spokeswoman from the city's Archdiocese said.

One image in the book features a guardian angel hovering over an altar boy with a priest lurking in the background.

"For safety's sake, a child and an adult shouldn't be alone in a closed room together," the angel counsels. In another, the angel warns of a sexual predator attempting to chat with a child over the Internet.

Yes, the idea is a bit hokey. And if the subject matter weren't so grave, it might well be filed in the "oddly-enough" category. But frankly, this story is mostly a pretense to bring up the same old facts and figures. Look where it goes from here:

David Clohessy, head of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, cautiously welcomed the initiative, but said it did not go far enough.

"We applaud the intent but worry a bit about the approach... it does still feel like almost every step taken by the hierarchy is one that's been prompted by external pressure," he told AFP.

The scale of child abuse by priests remained hidden in the United States for years until the Archbishop of Boston confessed in 2002 to protecting a priest he knew had sexually abused young members of his church.

According to the group "Bishop Accountability," some 3,000 priests out of the 42,000 across the country have since been denounced, some of whom have been investigated and convicted.

Since the scandal broke, US Catholic authorities have paid out close to 2.8 billion dollars in damages, forcing many dioceses to sell off their assets.

To review:

• The AFP seems to think that SNAP is the *only* advocacy group for children's protection in the U.S. Never mind the fact that their ambitions for change in the Church go far beyond child safety. You can't satisfy SNAP. Every time the Church tries to do something, it is criticized.
• The second source the article goes to is "Bishop Accountability", another organization that does far more than try to keep bishops accountable for genuine mistakes.
• Then come the statistics, also gleaned from Bishop Accountability. And the money. Can't forget that.

But finally, and most incongruously: what picture does the AFP choose to accompany this article?

Pope Benedict meeting with the Cardinals in Rome. ("Pope Benedict XVI (C) leads a prayer session at the Vatican November 2007.")

Nevermind what was being discussed at the time. The Archdiocese of New York publishes a coloring book to prevent abuse? It must have been personally ordered by Pope Benedict at the Vatican!

It's like writing an article about employees of Michigan Electric failing to recycle properly and attaching to that coverage a photograph of President Bush meeting with the EPA.

Only someone woefully ignorant, or blithely able to collapse widely-disparate elements of an organization together when it serves his purposes, could match this photograph with a story about a coloring book.\

update: Zadok the Roman from the comments:

"One image in the book features a guardian angel hovering over an altar boy with a priest lurking in the background."

A priest lurking in the background?

Fortunately the picture itself is much more innocuous: [see the full article here.]

Agreed - "lurking"?!