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April 25, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 8Oakland,
CA
Bishops name new protection director
By Kevin Eckstrom
Religion News Service
WASHINGTON (RNS) — A 29-year veteran of the Illinois
State Police has been named the new director of an office designed to
protect children in Catholic parishes from abusive priests.
Teresa Kettelkamp was named April 15 as executive director of the Office
of Child and Youth Protection within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Since July 2003, she has worked with the bishops to ensure that U.S. dioceses
have implemented abuse prevention policies that were adopted in 2002.
Kettelkamp succeeds Kathleen McChesney, the FBI’s former No. 3 official,
who left the post in February to take a job as vice president for crisis
management with the Walt Disney Company in Burbank, Calif.
“I’ll work tirelessly to continue to give victims a voice,
to encourage them to come forward for healing, and to strengthen the protection
mechanisms for children which were implemented” by the bishops,
Kettelkamp said in a statement.
Kettelkamp has worked with the Boston-based Gavin Group on a series of
audits that measured the church’s compliance with abuse reforms.
In February, the Gavin Group’s second audit reported that 11,750
victims have made credible allegations against 5,148 clerics between 1950
and 2004. She was a member of an auditing team that visited 16 dioceses
to measure compliance in 2003 and 2004, according to a news release.
Kettelkamp was the first woman to attain the rank of colonel in the Illinois
State Police.
She oversaw the department’s forensic sciences division, as well
as its internal affairs division and agents who investigated cases of
missing and sexually exploited children.
“She is very intelligent, she is very professional, she is highly
regarded in the state of Illinois by her law enforcement colleagues,”
McChesney said in an interview.
She graduated in 1974 from Quincy College in Quincy, Ill., and lives in
Springfield, Ill. where she is a lector and Eucharistic Minister at Cathedral
of the Immaculate Conception. She is the mother of two college-age children.
