Interestingly enough, Laurie Goodstein reports today in the New York Times about David Clohessy's Kansas City subpoena, as I did yesterday, and unless I'm badly misreading her report, it fairly well squares with what I posted on this matter yesterday. Goodstein cites the highly regarded legal scholar and advocate for victims, Marci Hamilton, who thinks that Catholic church leaders are deliberately trying to shut SNAP up by playing ugly legal hardball games in Missouri.
Goodstein also has insider information from Catholic League president Bill Donohue, who tells her that what is happening with SNAP in Missouri is being deliberately orchestrated by the U.S. Catholic bishops:
Lawyers for the church and priests say they cannot comment because of a judge’s order. But William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York, said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”
Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”
But as Goodstein notes, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, the media voice of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, flatly denies that there is any such organized conspiracy among the U.S. Catholic bishops to shut SNAP up and shut it down.
And she would say that, of course, wouldn't she? 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?
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