By Carol Marin
Chicago Sun-Times
April 7, 2010
http://www.suntimes.com/news/marin/2144283,CST-EDT-Carol07.article
Barbara Blaine tells the story of being stopped recently at a security checkpoint at Midway Airport.
The founder of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests was on her way to a meeting in Florida, she recounts, when a TSA officer approached to say, "I know who you are. You're Barbara. From SNAP."
For a fleeting second, Blaine figured she'd been tagged as a troublemaker.
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It was the opposite.
"I follow everything you do," the officer said quietly. "It happened to me too. But I can't be like you. I have to be anonymous."
Coming out as a victim of sexual abuse is an excruciating --and, for some, impossible -- process.
Blaine, 52, knows.
Abused by a 42-year-old Catholic priest in her home diocese of Toledo, Ohio, beginning in 1969 when she was just 13, Blaine knows the shame, self-loathing and guilt that shadows you from childhood into adulthood.
It took years before she could tell her devoutly Catholic parents. By that time, she had graduated from St. Louis University, a Jesuit school, gotten a master's degree in social work, joined the Catholic Worker Movement and run a homeless shelter in Chicago.
It was 1985.
And she had just read a published report about a priest sexually abusing altar boys.
"I got physically sick; my heart was racing," she said this week. "It sparked months of flashbacks and nightmares."
Blaine finally told her parents, and together they reported the abusing priest, Father Chet Warren, to the bishop.
"They said I was the first one to come forward ever on abuse in the diocese of Toledo."
That wasn't true.
But it was not until 1992 that Warren was removed from his post.
And only because Blaine called the diocese and said, "I'm going to be on Oprah, and I'm going to tell."
Oprah Winfrey's producer informed Blaine that Warren had just been relieved of his duties.
Warren is still alive and to this day, Blaine says, she cannot get a straight story on whether he remains a priest or has been defrocked.
The quest for a straight story is what keeps Blaine, a forceful yet gracious woman, on a mission to help survivors and to demand full disclosure from the church.
It is difficult to know what kind of world the Vatican sees outside its balconied windows.
On the one hand, Pope Benedict XVI deserves credit for installing in the diocese of Dublin, Ireland, an archbishop who has the capacity to say what too few in the hierarchy have.
Archbishop Diarmud Martin, in the wake of the horrific and growing scandal in his own country, has spoken openly and unequivocally about the "devastating shame" and the "theft" of childhoods.
He has spoken of how the abject failure of the church and its cover-up have had the "ironic result" of making this scandal more horrendous than it already was.
Why, one wonders, can't the pope himself say that?
And who in their right mind defends the pope, as Cardinal Angelo Sodano did on Easter Sunday, by characterizing news reports of this scandal "the petty gossip of the moment"?
Timothy Shriver, a Catholic writing in the Washington Post this week, put it cold, clear terms:
"The capital of trust between the people of the church and leaders is dangerously close to empty. The bishops cannot take the people for granted any longer. We were raised to love the gospel, to seek the truth, to serve justice, to grow in the bosom of the sacraments. But we will not do it under their leadership unless they change."
Today, the phone won't stop ringing at SNAP's offices. Survivor e-mails from Europe are multiplying.
Barbara Blaine's workload is only increasing.
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