A message from SNAPDFW’s facilitator, Lisa Kendzior
Acknowledge your courage
;)
It takes courage to acknowledge that we’ve been abused and it is not easy to even admit it to ourselves. Just browsing this website is a big step.Know that you are not alone!
If you’ve been victimized by clergy, please know that you are not alone. You can get better. You can reach out to others who’ve been hurt just like you have.
Together, we can heal one another.
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;)
Referring to the public relations “debacle” resulting from the Vatican crackdown on American nuns, Rome’s censoring of another nun’s theological writings, the USCCB’s investigation of the Girl Scouts, and the bishops’ pact against the Obama administration, Boston high priest Sean O'Malley’s solution proposed that the US bishops hire out better PR.
"The problem is a lack of substantive reform, not a lack of professional spin-meisters. If bishops would listen more often and take more decisive action – especially in clergy sex abuse and cover up cases – they wouldn’t have to worry about public relations." -- David Clohessy, SNAP Director
Read ‘Medium is message? Catholic bishops debate hiring a spokesperson’ in the Washington Post
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It can take many years to come to terms with abuse and to be able to talk about it, much less pursue legal action.
However, under most current law, victims of childhood sexual abuse have only a short time after they reach adulthood, or after they first realize, as an adult, that they had been abused – to seek justice from the institution where the abuse occurred.
Clearly, state statutes of limitations favor the abuser over the abused.
However, in New Jersey yesterday, it was reported that the State Judiciary Assembly voted to lift the state’s 2 year limit on the rights of victims to bring civil suits against the churches, schools and other organizations that failed to protect the children in their care.
The bill, if finally passed, would lift the time limit on lawsuits against alleged abusers as well as the institutions that employ them, and establish a two-year window for anyone to refile a suit that was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.
Chief among those who argued to continue limiting the rights of their child victims was the Roman Catholic Church, as is typically the case in disputes over statutes of limitations.
Read the full story in the North New Jersey news …
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In Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community, a young girl has claimed that her spiritual adviser has been abusing her for 3 years. But instead of taking steps to protect the girl until the truth is fully revealed, her accused perpetrator has been embraced and defended as wrongly accused.
The girl has been called a slut and a troublemaker, her family threatened and spat at on the street.
The rallying around the accused perpetrator, who goes on trial this month, and the ostracizing of his accuser and her family reflects long-held beliefs in this insular community, which insists that problems should be dealt with from within and that elders have far more authority than the young.
“There are other people that claim misconduct and they can’t come out because they’re going to be re-victimized and ostracized by the community,” said a friend of the young accuser’s family who counsels troubled girls.“
Read the full story in the Huffington Post
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So writes David Gibson in the Wall Street Journal. Throughout the crisis of the sexual abuse of innocents by priests, as it unfolded over the last 10 years in both the US and the world,
"the bishops exempted themselves from accountability—even though records showed that feckless inaction by many bishops, or even deliberate malfeasance by some, had allowed abusers to claim so many victims." -- The Wall Street Journal, 07 June 2012.
Read the full article 'US Bishops still stonewall on sex abuse' in the Wall Street Journal of 07 June 2012
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Comment from the leader of the morally bankrupt Roman church in America, and former CEO of the Milwaukee diocese, to charges that he paid off pedophile priests in his employ to go away, is glaringly conspicuous in its absence, at least as of this posting.
In yet another case of ‘how outrageous does outrageous have to get’ Timothy Dolan, leader of the USCCB, while head priest in Milwaukee, gave pedophile priests on the diocese payroll ten grand to simply start the paperwork of getting lost and finding another job.
When the Vatican said ok to the ‘laicization’ of these men, Dolan gave them another ten grand, and extended their church-goer financed benefits as well. So says the NY Times and the Milwaukee Post.
Read the entire account of this latest moral depravity perpetrated on the faithful of Milwaukee in the links below.
Read ‘Cardinal Authorized Payments to Abusers’ in the NYTimes and the Milwaukee Post …
Read ‘Dolan has nerve lecturing Obama on morals’ … in Irish Central
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In the mid 1990's a pair of controversial state supreme court decisions fully immunized the church from any and all corporate liability for priest child molesters based on a controversial interpretation of the first amendment. It is a testament, therefore, to the courage and persistence of Todd and Troy Merryfield and their families who have doggedly pursued justice through a much more daunting path of filing their claim under the state’s fraud statutes.
Read the full story on the WTAQ News website ...
Read the statement by SNAP Midwest Director Peter Isley ...
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It isn’t until they deal with the emotional trauma of what happened to them that they then are ready to confront their abuser.
Unfortunately, our justice system is not set up to deal with this all-too-common occurrence.
Instead, there is a statute of limitations in place that only gives victims a certain amount of time to file a complaint, either civil or criminal.
If they come forward after that time period has expired, they are barred from going forward. We have seen this most prominently with accusations against priests in the Catholic Church.
This (statute of limitations) system not only does not allow victims to seek the justice they deserve, but it also protects the sexual abuser, whose identity otherwise might never become public. -- The Philadelphia Patriot-News, 20 May 2012.
In response to the Penn State coaching and the Catholic Church priest abuse scandals, an editorial in yesterday's Philadelphia Patriot-News calls for altering the state's statute of limitations on reporting sex crimes. The new state code would then favor the victims, for a change, and no longer the abusers.
The editorial calls on Pennsylvania to create a “window” or period of time when victims who are beyond the statute of limitations can come forward and file a suit against an abuser.
Other states, such as California, Delaware and most recently, Hawaii, have enacted such laws. When California opened a one-year window, 300 cases were opened.
Read the full editorial in Sunday's Philadelphia Patriot-News ...
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They cared about money, they cared about the business of the church, not the flock and not the parishioners." -- Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington, Courtroom 304 Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center.
The mountain of evidence pointed to a long-standing culture in the hierarchy - and at times the ranks below - that chose secrecy over transparency and the welfare of the institution over victims.
"It was all about the good of Mother Church," Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington said in arguments to the judge Thursday. "They cared about money, they cared about the business of the church, not the flock and not the parishioners."
Read the full story in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer ...
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A Dallas County jury has found a Roman Catholic priest, John F. Fiala, guilty of plotting the death of a young boy he is accused of sexually abusing. Fiala could be sentenced to up to life in prison for solicitation of capital murder.
Fiala will also stand trial for the rape of the young boy, and for threatening him at gunpoint.
Read the full story in the Dallas News ...
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In a statement, the Legion said it was sorry it hadn't acted "earlier and more firmly" to remove priest Thomas Williams from his very public ministry as a spokesman, author and high-profile television personality.
Just last week, the Legion admitted that seven of its priests were under investigation by the Vatican for allegedly sexually abusing minors – suggesting that the same culture of secrecy and silence that Maciel used to cover his crimes enabled other priests to abuse children.
Williams, an American moral theologian and former superior of the Legion's Rome general office, admitted Tuesday he had had a relationship with a woman and had fathered a child.
This is the order beset by scandal following revelations that its late founder, priest Marciel Maciel, fathered three children with two women and sexually abused his seminarians.
Maciel died in 2008, and in 2009 the Legion admitted to his crimes.
The Maciel scandal has been particularly sensational given that the Mexican-born priest was held up by the John Paul II regime, including its second in command Joseph Ratzinger (currently pope), as a model for the faithful, with his priests admired for their orthodoxy and ability to bring in money and attract new seminarians.
The facade, however, began to crumble in 1997 with revelations of his abuse, though it wasn't until 2006 that the Vatican sanctioned Maciel to a lifetime of prayer and penance for his crimes.
Just last week, the Legion admitted that seven of its priests were under investigation by the Vatican for allegedly sexually abusing minors – suggesting that the same culture of secrecy and silence that Maciel used to cover his crimes enabled other priests to abuse children.
Read the full story 'Legion Of Christ Priest ... Admits He Fathered Child' in the Huffington Post ...
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"This month, it was the Leadership Conference of Women Religious that bishops were concerned about. Before that, it was Catholic Charities in the United States. Then it was Caritas, the church's umbrella organization for the coordination of international charity. And now it is the Girl Scouts." -- Joan Chittister
Joan Chittister is a well-known and outspoken Benedictine nun in the Roman church in America. In her column 'From Where I Stand' published May 16 on the National Catholic Reporter website, Joan speaks up loudly about the preposterous and apparently random gyrations of the all-male Catholic hierarchy caste, asking the following key question:
Where has all this energy for empirical destruction come from in a church now projecting its own serious problems with sexual issues onto everything that moves?
In the powerful article, Chittister says that each of the groups attacked has been "curtailed, 'investigated' or put in some kind of canonical receivership because of their reputed lack of orthodoxy on sexual issues or because of association with other groups that, according to the bishops, have the same problem. And all of that in the face of the sex abuse debacle of the church itself, still to be resolved, never monitored, and totally closed to outside investigation."
The article also briefly reviews a new book: Pius XII: The Hound of Hitler by noted historian Gerard Noel. Noel traces the rise to power of Eugenio Pacelli (a.k.a. Pius XII) whose goal became the centralization of the church, and the control of all its organizations. "Under Pacelli, law became the power of the church; the Gospel, its victim."
Chittister goes on:
"For the first time in history, the Vatican took sole control of episcopal appointments, extended "infallibility" to "definitive" statements like encyclicals and gave the pope the right to declare on universal issues without the advice and consent of episcopal conferences, synods or councils. It was a recipe for monarchical control. And it worked."Now, as a result, bishops are cut out of common cloth. They are chosen to be what the Vatican wants rather than what the culture or the people need. They are an arm of the Vatican rather than the voice of the flock in dialogue with the Vatican."
Read the full article in the National Catholic Reporter of 16 May 2012:
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Read the story from the Philadelphia Inquirer ...
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