By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
THE Catholic Church in Australia is waking up to addressing transparency and clarity in the delineation of youth ministry leadership roles that has contributed to confusion among young people, an expert youth affairs consultant told The Record.
Ahead of addressing the 8-12 February Foundations in Catholic Youth Leadership and Ministry conference run by the Archdiocese of Canberra-Goulburn’s CatholicLife evangelisation office, Dr Robert Long told The Record that Christian youth ministry, including Catholic, have suffered from a ‘role crisis’.
Dr Long, who headed the ACT Office of Youth, chaired the National Youth Affairs Research Scheme and was on the National Youth Taskforce of the Ministerial Council for Youth and Training, said school teachers and welfare workers often brazenly cross between their ‘corporate’ roles and as youth ministers, which involves a more personal role, causing ethical dilemmas for themselves and problems for the youth to whom they minister.
“The Church (Christian Churches) has not been clear about the delineation of roles and adults think they can cross over roles without being transparent about it. You need to be clear about the role you’re playing in a given environment. It’s difficult for a child to manage those delicate differences if the adult is not being transparent about it,” he said.
“There’s no reason why a priest can’t be a young person’s friend”, he said, but they need to be clear they’re not acting as a teacher when they are in a more personal youth ministry setting.
People who have not worked in youth ministry automatically often think they can do so because they are teachers, he said, which causes various forms of stress for young people trying to work out how a person who’s just chastised them on a weekday for, say, not doing their homework suddenly claims to be their friend in a youth ministry setting.
More serious are cases where a youth worker thinks it’s fine to touch or hug a young person in a certain way and think they’re entitled to cross that boundary as it’s allowed in a non-legislated environment, as opposed to a Centacare or school environment which has legal guidelines of behaviour.
The less corporate structure of youth ministry environments means problematic activity is not reported. Things like sexual abuse scandals are partly due to this lack of transparency and clarity in roles, he said.
The ‘core business’ of school and youth ministry are also fundamentally different, he said, as in school the students are non-voluntary clients, as opposed to youth ministry.
“There’s a clear difference between working in an occupation where such things as reporting things are mandated in an Act of Parliament, and a non-legislated area where there’s a moral obligation which changes the way the person thinks about the client and the environment,” Dr Long said.
However, in the case of the Catholic Church, he believes the lack of ethical guidelines is due to complacency rather than naivety. However, things are clearly changing, as in 2007 he was called in as a consultant to review the Archdiocese of Canberra-Goulburn’s youth agency, and again next week to address a major leadership conference.
“The sheer fact that CatholicLife have reviewed their youth work shows they’ve got guts and are not complacent,” said Dr Long.
“Then to ask a Protestant academic to take part in this leadership process, the day after the Archbishop (Mark Coleridge) does a talk on Saints Peter and Paul, is hardly an act of complacency, but an act of courage.”
The conference, which also includes renowned US Dominican Sisters Mary Madeline, Mary Rachel and Cecilia Joseph talking on Giftedness and personal growth and Sydney’s Good Shepherd Seminary Rector Fr Anthony Percy talking on A Catholic theology of human sexuality, was Archbishop Coleridge’s idea.