Dolan and Donohue Again: Religious Bullies Joined at the Hip Continue to Attack SNAP

Last week, I wrote that Dr. Donohue of the Catholic League appeared to have USCCB insider information when he told the media recently that "the bishops have come together collectively" to fight the group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.  Dr. Donohue was referring to the legal hardball games that attorneys working for Catholic officials are playing in Missouri. 

And I concluded,

Though, when the leader of the USCCB, His Eminence Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan, not only embraces but defends Dr. Donohue, one has to wonder whose insider information is more correct here--Donohue's or Walsh's?

And now it seems that His Eminence is out to prove me correct regarding the links between His Eminence as leader of the U.S. Catholic bishops, Dr. Donohue, and the attack on the SNAP group.  His Eminence has just posted a statement on his blog linking to a Catholic League statement by one William A. Donohue, Ph.D., which characterizes David Clohessy of SNAP as a "con artist."

For Joshua McElwee's summary of this story at National Catholic Reporter, see here.  And as Frank Bruni has just written in the New York Times, 

if you want to understand just how much pain the crisis has caused Catholics, along with some of the ways it has tested families and challenged Catholics’ faith, his story is an instructive, heartbreaking one. 

I told it in some detail in The Times’s Sunday magazine a decade ago, and provide the link here. I still vividly remember sitting with him and interviewing him, just as I still vividly remember sitting with and interviewing many people with recollections of sexual abuse by priests. Sexual abuse by any trusted adult is a shattering thing; sexual abuse by a priest or minister or other religious cleric upends a child’s every assumption about who’s safe and who’s not; where moral leadership can be found; what it means for a person to wear a badge of authority or the vestments of holiness. It says that nothing and no one is really safe.

In the voice of this journalist for a secular newspaper, I hear compassion and understanding.  I hear what I'd expect to hear from a pastoral leader of a Christian church.

In the voices of the two religious bullies now attacking a group whose reason for existence is to support survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and trying to smear the reputation of one of the leaders of that group, I hear anything other than the voice of compassion and understanding.

And I can only conclude, all over again, that American Catholics seeking bona fide pastoral leadership, will have to look now for other sources of pastoral guidance and spiritual inspiration than most of the leaders of our church.  We find ourselves in the situation of the psalmist (Psalm 120) when she or he wrote, 

Woe to me that I dwell in Meshek,
that I live among the tents of Kedar!
Too long have I lived
among those who hate peace.
I am for peace;
but when I speak, they are for war.

With spiritual leaders of the ilk of His Eminence Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan heading our national bishops' conference, and with the willingness of such spiritual leaders to ally themselves with people of the ilk of Dr. Donohue, we American Catholics find ourselves sojourning in a dry and weary place, where no water is.

If there is water for us, it has to be found somewhere outside the boundaries of a church led by men like this.