Desperate Catholic Church Targets Victims of Pedophile Priests

By Bridgette P. LaVictoire
Lez Get Real
March 16, 2012

http://lezgetreal.com/2012/03/desperate-catholic-church-targets-victims-of-pedophile-priests/comment-page-1/

The Roman Catholic Church has decided that they want to go after the leading advocacy group for those victimized by pedophile priests. Lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have sued the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests or SNAP to try and compel the group to release two decades of emails detailing correspondences with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

The move is an attempt to cut SNAP off from those they help and bully those who might seek their help into not going to the group where the dealings are assumed to have a certain amount of confidentiality.

According to the New York Times:

The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.

Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University, stated “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”

It is not surprising that William Donohue, the head of the the Catholic League, would attack SNAP. Donohue has made it clear that he has no problem with Catholic priests molesting children. He stated that “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church. . .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.”

Donohue has long since defended the Catholic Church, their actions regarding pedophile priests, and even the pedophile priests themselves. He even defended a recent group of priests who were arrested for molesting a young boy in Pennsylvania. Of course, Donohue even stated “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one.”

You can read the rest of this on the New York Times site.

The reality is that the Catholic Church desperately wants to protect what they see as their right- the right to commit and get away with crimes in the dark. They have continuously refused to acknowledge that the problems that they face is not that these priests are busy molesting childre, but rather that they have ignored the problem and tried to hide it in an attempt to keep the Church from being hurt.