WASHINGTON
Seattle Weekly
By Sara Bernard Tue., Feb 23 2016
Last month, the Seattle Catholic Archdiocese published a list of 77 names of priests and other clergy credibly accused of child sexual abuse while working or living in western Washington. (It was updated a week later and now contains 78 names.) As a step toward healing and transparency, it made a significant splash, but perhaps not quite the one the church had hoped. Releasing a list of names is “not a worthless gesture,” says David Clohessy, executive director of the St. Louis-based Survivors’ Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), but the information is, to him, infuriatingly incomplete.
“There have been tons of exposes, and harsh editorials, and criminal prosecutions, and lawsuits, and settlements, and apologies, and promises” involving the Catholic church, argues Clohessy, who was molested for years, along with his two brothers, by a priest in Missouri’s Jefferson City Diocese. He says Seattle is the latest in a list of dioceses across the country to “parcel out tiny bits of information” without revealing larger, systemic truths. “The one untried remedy here is punishing—or even exposing—the enablers. I challenge Catholics to name one church employee anywhere, from custodian to cardinal, who’s lost one day’s pay for ignoring or concealing horrific crimes against kids.”
Clohessy, like many survivors and advocates, including former King County Superior Court judge Terry Carroll, former U.S. attorney Mike McKay, Seattle attorney Michael Pfau, SNAP Northwest director Mary Dispenza, and the Seattle Times editorial board, is urging the Seattle Archdiocese to release the full files on its predator priests—a trove of still-secret documents that private consultants used to put the original list together.
That would paint a much fuller picture, Clohessy and others say, of the system that allowed this abuse to happen.
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