UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Linsey
National Catholic Reporter has just published an editorial decrying the attack now being mounted on the SNAP organization by lawyers working for the Catholic church. The editorial frames its statement by recounting the story of Bartek Obloj, who hanged himself in Poland in 2007. Obloj was thirteen years old at the time. He left a suicide note stating that his parish priest, Stanislaw Kaszowski, had sexually molested him.
Kaszowski celebrated Bartek Obloj’s funeral Mass. He was then moved to a new parish. He refuses to testify in court at court hearings about the case. As the NCR editorial notes, one of the primary reasons that advocacy groups working to assist survivors of clerical sexual abuse are still needed is that cases like the case of Bartek Obloj continue to reach the news.
The abuse is still happening. And church officials continue to seek to skirt and defy the law when cases of abuse are made public.
NCR’s editorial finds the court orders demanding that SNAP disclose information that has been kept private up to now “wrong on a number of counts.” In the first place, these orders are demanding documents that disclose an extraordinary and unprecedented range of information, and so the court orders represent “a kind of legal carte blanche that courts should protect against” and not facilitate. People who have sought SNAP’s assistance and have no connection whatsoever to the cases in Kansas City or St. Louis where the disclosure of documents is being demanded will have their privacy violated.
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