BishopAccountability.org
	NSAC Announces Support of Irish Sunday Mass Boycott September 26 NSAC September 24, 2010 http://www.nsacoalition.org/ The United States based National Survivor Advocates Coalition (NSAC) supports the Sunday, September 26 Mass boycott in Ireland and calls upon Catholics in the United States and around the world to boycott in solidarity. NSAC takes this action because the boycott is rooted in a response to the sexual abuse scandal and justice for women. The coalition does not take this action because we do not understand the value of the Mass or the Sunday obligation. We do. The Irish boycott was called by Jennifer Sleeman, an 80 year old Irish woman in Clonakilty, Cork, who is the mother of a monk and 54 years a convert to Catholicism. Her call to action came after the release of the Murphy and Ryan reports in Ireland through which horrible revelations of abuse of children came to light along with the protection of abusers by bishops and religious superiors. NSAC’s founders know that there is aversion by Catholics in the pew to raise their heads above the water line to take any visible actions against priests and bishops even when the cause is just and right. We don’t understand this aversion but we acknowledge its exists. We also know the weight of it contributes to continued suffering by the survivors and buttresses a hierarchy’s deflection of responsibility. Sexual abuse is a crime. There has never been an hour, a day or a year when it was right for the innocent and vulnerable to be raped and sodomized. No one should know this better than Bishops, the Pope and the Vatican Curia. Yet it has taken massive news coverage on three continents and investigations by two civil governments to provoke even the weakest of responses from the Church. To add insult to injury the weak response is touted as major reform. Pope Benedict XVI has more than 20 years of experience in seeing the very reports of sexual abuse that the people of Ireland and the rest of the world have come to know in the news media revelations. His knowledge comes both from being the Archbishop of Munich and heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It is against this backdrop that the boycott is called. This Sunday presents an opportunity for Catholics in a quiet, private absence from their pew in their Catholic parish to open a slit for the piercing of the darkness. No rabble rousing is needed only silence. By standing in solidarity with the Irish boycott we hope for its success that in the emptiness Wisdom may enter in. We encourage our readers, women and men, to re-arrange this week’s usual encounter with the Lord at Mass to leave a visible openness in their usual pew in their usual parish. Out of the void, God created.
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