UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Brian Roewe | Feb. 20, 2017
In a matter of weeks, an extreme makeover changed the face of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
Gone is David Clohessy, its national director and the relentless force behind the group’s advocacy efforts.
Gone is Barbara Blaine, its president and the former Catholic Worker who founded the support network in 1988, in part through a phone call to the Phil Donahue Show.
What remains, SNAP says, is its wide network of volunteer leaders who perform “the vast majority” of its work outside public view, as well as its longstanding commitment to survivors of sexual abuse.
“I think our core mission has always been to help those who have been hurt and protect the vulnerable,” said Barbara Dorris, now SNAP managing director after 12 years as its outreach director. “We are still doing both and will continue to do both and maybe in kind of different ways.”
The change in personnel didn’t so much spark an examination of SNAP’s future so much as it fueled already ongoing conversations of what the highest-profile advocacy group against clerical sexual abuse of children, with 20,000-plus members, will look like in the future, who and how it will serve, and even what it might call itself.
“I think any organization has to change and grow to remain viable, to remain healthy,” Dorris said.
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