SNAP Founder Barbara Blaine: Fountain of Justice

Toledo Blade
September 28, 2017

http://www.toledoblade.com/Editorials/2017/09/28/Fountain-of-justice.html

Barbara Blaine, the founder and former longtime president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, died suddenly a few days ago while on vacation with her husband. Though she had not lived in Toledo for many years, she is one of the great heroes in the history of this city.

Ms. Blaine grew up in Toledo, and it was in a Toledo Catholic school that she was sexually assaulted as a grade school child — by a parish priest she trusted and admired. Years of private pleading with the bishop and other officials of the diocese of Toledo resulted only in broken promises and lies. She got no justice. Barbara Blaine made up her mind that she would devote all her energy, and the rest of her life, to justice. And that is what she did. She had a vocation — a religious one.

SNAP has not been without controversy. And it has sometimes, in its righteousness, painted with brush strokes too careless and too broad.

But, by setting up an international organization on clergy child abuse that has chapters throughout the world, Ms. Blaine and SNAP made it possible for a victim almost anywhere to tell his, or her, story, to get help, and to seek justice.

It has been said that the clergy sex abuse scandal in Boston, tenaciously exposed by fine journalists at the Boston Globe, and famously documented and lauded, could never have been uncovered without SNAP. For abuse victims simply would not have felt safe coming out of the shadows. They would not have felt, or been, supported — legally, psychologically, or emotionally — without SNAP.

And SNAP began as one lonely, wounded, angry woman’s voice.

Barbara Blaine’s was that rare life that left footprints. She knew truth was the fountain of justice. And thousands of people told the truth, found some measure of justice, and were set free, because of her. Thousands were freed of a secret they could no longer live with. Thousands were given the opportunity to heal.

It should also be said that thousands of other victims found no justice, and little peace. Many have taken their own lives.

And this is part of what propelled Barbara Blaine and made her such a fierce advocate. She felt that the Roman Catholic Church had never really done penance for clergy child abuse and that sound preventive and protective measures had never been universally applied throughout the institution. Justice had not been accomplished systemically. But neither had justice been abandoned.

Thanks to Barbara Blaine, the horror of trusted clergymen abusing children can never again be a secret and silent contagion. It can never again be so easily perpetrated upon thousands of children, with impunity, and be enabled by almost everyone who should have put a stop to it. Never again will clergy child abuse be so widespread and so often allowed. The world is watching now.

Ms. Blaine worked, all of her life, on both the micro and macro levels for people who really were lambs to the slaughter. Her zeal probably shortened her own life, but it saved many others, and it was beautiful.