Cardinal McElroy: “The numbers don’t lie. They never did, but now they’re not lying in our favor.”

On Monday, Robert Cardinal McElroy, Bishop of the Diocese of San Diego, kicked of the diocese’s “Catholic Schools Week” with a press conference that announced some surprising news: “It is now statistically more likely for a student to get molested in a public school setting than in a Catholic school setting, or even a Catholic ministerial setting. True, the Diocese just had to file for bankruptcy for the second time in less than 20 years in order to settle a bunch of sex abuse cases - 457, to be exact. But the fact remains that the majority of those new cases concern events that took place more than 50 years ago, and the claims were filed only because California extended the statute of limitations. The simple truth is that we’ve cleaned up our act. But public schools? Just in the past couple of weeks, you had Stacy Michelle Walker, drama and theater tech teacher Mount Carmel High School, sentenced to three years in state prison for a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old. And Connor Chanove, substitute teacher for Vista Unified, sentenced to 10 years for lewd acts with a 13-year-old. A lawsuit filed against San Dieguito for failing to prevent school supervisor Omar Galeana from molesting a 12-year-old girl. Escondido High teacher Kyiri Tisdale arrested and accused of sex acts with two underage students. And on August 9, the bombshell report, released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which according to the Union-Tribune, found San Diego Unified ‘had failed to meet its obligations under federal law in responding to 253 reports and complaints of sexual harassment and assault of students from 2017 to 2020.’ When it comes to getting your child a quality education that doesn’t involve sexual trauma, we think the choice is clear.”