Remembering Clergy Abuse Survivor Joe Crowley

By Jamie Bologna and Tonya Mosley
WBUR
April 18, 2017

http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2017/04/18/joe-crowley-scanlan

[with audio]

"I was still like a kid with all this resentment and anger and rage and self pity, and it just owned me. And through a series of things, hard work, and people who were there for me in so many areas, so many ways, I learned how to be a survivor."

That was Joe Crowley, speaking to The Boston Globe, after the release of the movie "Spotlight," about the paper's investigation in the Catholic Church's cover-up of sex abuse by clergy.

Crowley, who passed away on Sunday at 58, was one of the first survivors of clergy sexual abuse to come forward, paving the way for so many more victims of abuse to speak out.

As Sacha Pfeiffer writes in the Globe today about her first meeting with Joe, "He was smart, funny, and articulate, but also nervous, insecure, and still trying to recover emotionally from what had happened to him decades earlier."

Joe's brave story touched so many. One of those people was Jim Scanlan, himself a survivor of clergy sex abuse.