ST. LOUIS (MO)
Riverfront Times
February 12, 2020
By Danny Wicentowski
On June 13, 2002, David Clohessy stepped into the light of history. A former altar boy in a rural Catholic church in Moberly, Missouri, he stood at a podium in a massive hotel ballroom in Dallas — and staring back at him from row up upon row of tables, packed into the room ten-deep, were some 280 Catholic bishops.
Many in that audience were already familiar with Clohessy as the national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, the country’s longest-active support group for victims of clergy abuse. Clohessy had spent years trying to grab the bishops’ attention.
Indeed, Clohessy seemed to be quoted in every other newspaper story about a predator priest going back to the early 1990s. He’d show up at churches with fliers listing support group meetings for victims, and he’d prod reporters to cover the protest. He held press conferences with tearful victims announcing lawsuits. He insisted on calling accused priests “perps.”
He was, in a word, a nuisance to the Catholic Church. And until that moment in 2002, that’s all he had ever been.
That day, with his square-framed glasses slightly askew and his outfit of a simple gray suit and white shirt, the SNAP director looked more like an accountant than the radical victims’ rights advocate. But this meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was focused specifically on the exploding clergy abuse scandal — and it had drawn the eyes of the world.
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