It has been a while since I've offered readers an update of what's being done to the victim advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) in Missouri. As I noted last month (and here), SNAP is facing unprecedented challenges in Kansas City and St. Louis as attorneys working for the Catholic hierarchy play hardball legal games with the group, demanding that it disclose private communications that have nothing to do with the cases for which these disclosures are being demanded.
SNAP had predicted that the time and money required to defend itself against these tactics would have a negative impact on the operation of the organization--in fact, SNAP leaders have stated that this appears to be precisely the goal of the Catholic officials using the legal system to attack SNAP in this way. And as Joshua McElwee reports at National Catholic Reporter last week, that's exactly what's happening.
The demands made by attorneys in Missouri are having serious financial implications for SNAP, as its leaders now spend large portions of their time seeking to deal with those demands. And the demands continue to proliferate: attorneys making the initial demands for depositions have just made new filings seeking more depositions and refuting SNAP's claim that its confidentiality should be respected, since it functions in a way akin to a rape-crisis center.
Re: the latter, McElwee writes,
Additionally, the motion alleges that public information demonstrates that SNAP is not such a center -- specifically the fact that the group "does not appear" to be in partnership with the National Sexual Assault Hotline and that it was not found in the Yellow Pages under listings of rape crisis centers.
Among other reasons the motion gives for arguing that SNAP is not covered by Missouri's protections for rape crisis centers is the fact that Clohessy allegedly said in the deposition that the group would not release confidential information about survivors even if they sign a waiver allowing him to.
Rebecca Randles, the attorney representing the plaintiff in the abuse case, said in a phone interview Thursday that she thought the motion's arguments that SNAP could not qualify as a rape crisis center were not "very weighty."
Referring to one of the arguments the motion makes against SNAP's qualifications to fit into that definition because Clohessy works out of his home, Randles said the determination for protections under Missouri law come from the substance of what an organization does, not where it is located.
"You have to look at the substance," Randles said. "The whole question really is: Do people go there because they're in crisis from sexual assault? And the answer is absolutely, yes they do."
"The vast bulk of what they do is support victims of rape and assault, so they have to be a rape crisis center," she said.
Last week, SNAP sent out an email updating supporters on the serious and destructive situation in Missouri. The email contains a fact sheet providing a concise summary of what is at stake in the situation, and what church officials and their lawyers are seeking to do to SNAP. I find that Frank Douglas has published this fact sheet at his Voice from the Desert site, and I want to direct readers' attention to this summary of the facts.
And to note that SNAP needs all the support that any of us can give it right now. As the fact sheet notes, what is occurring in Missouri has the earmarks of a coordinated attack by Catholic officials, and it is clearly designed to "shut [SNAP] down and shut victims up." The fact sheet states,
This is the first time any SNAP staffer has been subpoenaed in 23 years, within weeks, and they’ve done it to two of our three professional staff. The first two subpoenas, though issued in different diocese by different lawyers, are virtually identical.
And, to underscore a point made above, these unprecedented requests for subpoenas from SNAP officials being made by lawyers working for the Catholic church in both Kansas City and St. Louis have to do with two lawsuits in which SNAP is not and never has been involved.
Meanwhile, on another (but clearly related) front, within little more than three weeks of the death of Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, lawyers in that diocese defending Monsignor William Lynn, who stands accused of endangering the welfare of children by keeping priests with a known history of abuse in ministry, have just mounted an astonishing defense of Lynn.
They're claiming that Lynn himself is the victim of a cover-up that reaches much higher in the hierarchy, and which included Cardinal Bevilacqua. Who is now dead and unable to refute the claim. And who was persistently prevented from testifying prior to his death due to his advanced years and infirmity.
As Susan Matthews notes at her Catholics4Change site,
This information is rife with implications. While the defense is using it to benefit Lynn, it points to major conspiracy. Contributing Catholic parents must feel completely violated by the abuse of trust. So many children were placed in harm’s way. It’s hard not to feel like a pawn in their game of power, money and lies.
In other words, whether Lynn was himself directly responsible for the cover-up that resulted in a large number of priests known to have abused minors remaining in ministry right up to 2011 in the Philadelphia archdiocese, or whether that cover-up went higher, the losers will continue to be Catholic children and Catholic parents. Either way, the hierarchy wins. And lay Catholics lose.
The lawyers defending Lynn appear to think they're making a slick move by trying to reassign blame for the abuse cover-up in Philadelphia to the now-deceased Bevilacqua. But anyone following the abuse cases for any time now already knows that the cover-up of these cases in the Catholic church stems from the very top of the church, and that diocesan underlings like Lynn are only doing what they are commanded to do when they participate in the cover-up.
But this exonerates the Lynns of the church from guilt no more than the defense of Nazi collaborators who sought to argue after World War II that they were only following orders in murdering Jews exonerated those collaborators from guilt. If anything, the defense of Lynn that his attorneys are now trying to mount--which boils down to a "no one's responsible when everyone is guilty" line of argumentation--only makes his complicity in a system of outright evil worse rather than better.
Since anyone who knows that his or her superiors are actively involved in material evil, but who tacitly colludes in that evil and never challenges the superiors, is every bit as guilty as those unnamed and apparently unreachable higher-ups.
The shameful, sleazy defense Lynn's lawyers are now trying to mount tells me several things as I continue to look at what lawyers working for Catholic officials are doing to SNAP officials in Missouri. The first is that anyone who imagines the legal system works on the side of the angels is a fool.
And that (second point) this may be particularly the case when the legal system is at the disposal of a rich and wily organization like the Catholic church, whose officials have proven themselves capable of doing and saying almost anything--in this case, pinning blame on a just-deceased cardinal who is no longer around to defend himself--to keep the closed hierarchical system impervious to demands for justice, shut off from all transparency, and unaccountable to the people of God it ostensibly serves.
The all-guilty-but-none-responsible defense in Philadelphia may well backfire--if lay Catholics in Philadelphia and elsewhere are smart enough to see through the game church leaders and their attorneys are trying to play here. And if they also begin to draw parallels between this particular vicious, amoral game and the vicious and amoral game church leaders and their attorneys are playing with SNAP and survivors of clerical sexual abuse in Missouri.
And if they recall who's now sitting in Bevilacqua's seat in Philadelphia as this shameful legal defense of Lynn is mounted, and who put him there. The cover-up does, indeed, go to the very top of the church.
But this does not exonerate a single man in the evil chain of command who has worked to keep that chain unbroken.
The graphic shows shepherds near Jerusalem leading their flocks in the early 1900s, from the Vintage Everyday site.
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