UNITED STATES
The Morning Call
Bill White
David Clohessy, national director for the group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, likes to tell the story of the struggling early days of his organization — and when that changed, dramatically.
Clohessy, a victim of sexual abuse by a priest for about four years starting when he was 11 or 12, began volunteering for the support, information and advocacy group SNAP in the early ’90s. But as you saw if you’ve watched the Oscar-contending movie “Spotlight,” SNAP had a terrible time generating interest in the things it knew about child sexual abuse by priests and the way cases were covered up, in Boston and all over the country.
The movie dramatizes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation that exposed widespread child sexual abuse by Boston area priests and the massive coverup that allowed it to continue. It also depicted the frustration of New England SNAP founder/leader Phil Saviano, who had had no success in interesting the Globe in this larger story despite occasional individual reports of abuse by priests.
Clohessy said he had the same conversation every December with SNAP founder and fellow priest abuse survivor Barbara Blaine as they reviewed another frustrating year. “It went like this,” he said. “‘This is going nowhere. None of this will ever see the light of day. Why don’t we pack it up?'”
So it was in December 2001, just before the Globe story broke in early 2002. “I said to Barbara, ‘Well, these folks at the Boston Globe say they’re doing a big investigation. Let’s try it for one more year.
“Just a couple of weeks later, we felt like geniuses for not shutting the whole thing down.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.