SAN FRANCISCO (CA)
San Francisco California
By Jason Berry
Good Friday is a hallowed day in the Christian calendar, when churches the world over commemorate Jesus's death on the cross. This year it fell on March 25, which coincided with an unseemly spectacle for the Roman Catholic Church at the San Francisco County Courthouse. A civil jury returned a $437,000 verdict for Dennis Kavanaugh, who had been sexually abused by a priest, often, as an altar boy many years before. The priest was dead; the archdiocese and its insurance carriers would pay. At 5 p.m. the media, court watchers, and restless men and women from a group called SNAP—Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests—waited in the hallway for Kavanaugh and his lawyers to make public statements.
As he watched the trial, a 46-year-old Bay Area real estate developer named Dan McNevin rewound a mental film track to his own adolescence and a different priest who had traumatized him as an altar boy in Fremont. McNevin felt the old anger flooding back, the black stuff that years of therapy had taught him to stanch. There he sat, with a good property portfolio, watching Kavanaugh, who had sunk from a $90,000-a-year perch as an electronics salesman to a $16-an-hour job doing landscape work. Kavanaugh had given humiliating testimony on how his marriage had hit the skids, rage ate at him, and he had even threatened his wife with a gun. For that he spent a year in jail; his career tanked, as did his marriage. McNevin had gone to enough SNAP meetings to know how self-destructive some survivors can be.
As the courthouse news conference was about to begin, McNevin's cell phone rang. He stepped away from the din. "This is Archbishop Levada," came the voice at the other end.
"What?" blurted McNevin. For all of SNAP's in-your-face politics, the last caller McNevin expected was the man his group saw as the imperious face of a church that had betrayed them.