UNITED STATES
Voice from the Desert
Statement by Barbara Dorris, SNAP outreach director, 314 503 0003
Now that the obvious has been re-affirmed (that pedophile priests molest girls and boys), let’s hope researchers start to focus on the real question: why do thousands of current and former church employees stay silent about clergy sex crimes and cover ups? That’s what really needs to be addressed.
We have serious doubts about the John Jay project but this conclusion - that the sexual orientation of child molesting clerics isn’t significant - doesn’t surprise us. Roughly half of our 9,000 members are women who were molested as girls by priests, brothers, nuns, bishops and seminarians. We’ve long seen that courts and media tend to minimize the harm done to females who are assaulted by clergy.
2) Statement by Barbara Blaine, SNAP founder and president, 312 399 4747
The gender orientation of predator priests is irrelevant. What matters, though, is the church’s deeply-rooted culture of sexual secrecy that stems from most priests’ forbidden sexual activity.
When all sex by priests is wrong - dating, masturbation, porn, everything - then most priests will have sexual secrets. And they will be very reluctant to ‘rat out’ their brother priests who are known or suspected pedophiles.
3) Statement by Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director 414 429 7259
Since 2004, since John Jay College began tabulating numbers for the American bishops on priests that have committed sex crimes against children, nearly 1,000 newly identified priests have been reported to dioceses around the country as child molesters, averaging nearly 200 year. In fact, last year a record number of priests were reported to have molested children, a staggering 311 newly identified priest offenders. The grand total of priests who have assaulted children in the United States over the past several decades is now nearing a staggering total of 6,000.