Catholic Clergy Abuse Victims" Group May Come under Scrutiny, Report Says

By John Simerman
The Times-Picayune
May 11, 2012

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/judges_ruling_could_open_windo.html

A national victims group at the forefront of revealing clergy sexual abuse allegations against the Roman Catholic Church may soon be forced to reveal its own inner workings, the Chicago Tribune reports today. The report says a Missouri judge has ruled that decades of correspondence of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, be turned over.

Bishop Robert Finn, of Kansas City, Mo., leaves a meeting at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' annual fall assembly in Baltimore in 2011. A Jackson County judge in Kansas City on April 5 denied several motions to dismiss misdemeanor charges against the Roman Catholic bishop and his diocese. Finn is the highest-ranking U.S. church official criminally charged with shielding an abusive priest.

The ruling would include correspondence with victims, lawyers and journalists that the group considers confidential. It comes in the case of a Kansas City priest who faces abuse allegations.

Members of the Chicago-based group, which has chapters across the country, fear that the church is pursuing a frontal attack. The group says the ruling could chill victims from coming forward to SNAP. The St. Louis Archdiocese, the report said, is pursuing a similar strategy in another case.

Lawyers for the church argue that their aim is not to violate the privacy of victims, witnesses and others. The correspondence, they say, would shed light on whether plaintiffs who have sued the church revealed their alleged abuse to SNAP earlier, falsifying claims of "repressed memory" under coaching by the group.

That would place their claims beyond Missouri's statute of limitations.

At issue, legally, is whether SNAP should be shielded from having to reveal the correspondence under protections afforded rape crisis centers, or whether it acts more like recovery groups that don't have the same legal safeguards.

Depending on geography, SNAP has had a choppy relationship with the church amid a sex abuse scandal that mushroomed in 2002.

In some cases, dioceses have come to work with the group to support victims of sometimes decades-old abuse by Catholic clergy. But group members have frequently attacked church leaders whom they view as slow to come clean on abuse allegations and how they handled them.

Building with a series of allegations in the United States and Ireland, the Catholic sex abuse scandal peaked with a series of stories in the Boston Globe in 2002 revealing that church leaders often buried allegations and simply moved priests around. Thousands of allegations streamed into courts across the country, leading to massive money judgments and settlements that hobbled many dioceses.