Bullying of SNAP by Catholic Officials: More Recent Commentary

David and Goliath

And more valuable educational resources I'd like to recommend this morning--these about the attack of the U.S. Catholic bishops on Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP):

At Religion Dispatches, Kathryn Joyce interviews David Clohessy about what's happening in Missouri, as lawyers working for Catholic bishops demand that SNAP open its internal files and disclose reams of information, including names of and communications by abuse survivors and supporters of abuse survivors who have approached SNAP in the expectation of confidentiality.  As I've noted a number of times previously, what is curious about these legal requests is that they're being made in lawsuits in Kansas City and St. Louis to which SNAP is not a party and in which it has no involvement.

Joyce asks Clohessy why he thinks Catholic officials are doing this, through their legal teams.  His response: 

What they’re trying to do is to discredit, derail, bankrupt and silence SNAP. And to scare anyone—police, prosecutors, victims, concerned Catholics—from contacting us and reporting crimes and exposing corruption.

At her Worthy Adversary site, abuse survivor Joelle Casteix concludes that, in behaving as they are now towards SNAP, Catholic officials are "putting the 'bully' in the religious bully pulpit."  As Casteix notes, what is most disheartening to many Catholics about the bishops' bullying behavior towards abuse victims and SNAP is how it belies what the bishops themselves have taught the rest of us as Catholic laypersons: 

I suppose I really wished that the Catholic Church would live up to the New Testament values that they taught me as a child. Things like, “love your enemy,” and verse 10 of the Beatitudes, “Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 

When push comes to shove, that’s all that victims have ever wanted: justice.

And at the website of SNAP Minnesota, Vinnie Nauheimer argues that the jurists who are now permitting Catholic officials to go on their unprecedented fishing expedition in SNAP's files have taken the prudence out of jurisprudence.  He points out that an intentional tribunal has found the Catholic church  guilty of acts of genocide against native American children in Canada; the European Commission has accused the Vatican of money laundering; the New York Times has recently reported that priests and nuns in Spain and Argentina have been guilty of trafficking in babies and selling them for profit; "every grand jury convened in the United States to investigate clergy abuse and their equivalent in Ireland roundly criticized the church for their always abominable and in some cases, criminal behavior"; and in Germany, the largest Catholic publishing company, Weltbild, has been publishing pornographic novels for years. 

And so juristic prudence would seem to dictate extreme caution when an institution capable of such behavior demands that a group whose sole reason for existence is to protect and assist survivors of childhood clerical sexual abuse throw open its files for inspection by leaders of an institution with such a dubious track record.

Nauheimer concludes,  

Based on the truths above, giving the lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church unfettered access to Snap files is the moral equivalent of giving the Mafia unlimited access to FBI files. It is simply unconscionable! Did the church take advantage of the hole created by an imprudent jurist? You bet they did. They opened a six-lane highway and lined it with dumpsters prepared to take away everything they could get away with. The proof is in the transcripts from Mr. Clohessy’s deposition. The church went back twenty-three years though the incident in question only happened recently. In six hours of deposition given by Mr. Clohessy, most of the questions had nothing to do with the case of Rev. Michael Tierney who is accused by four people of sexual abuse. The NY Times tells us, “most of the questions were not about the case but about the network — its budget, board of directors, staff members, donors and operating procedures.” Surely the jurist could have limited the scope of the deposition as has been done so many times to so many victims trying to depose church leaders.

And he's right.