Catholic Church Going after Those Meanie Victims of Rape and Abuse

The Hotspyer
March 13, 2012

http://hotspyer.com/2012/03/13/catholic-church-going-after-those-meanie-victims-of-rape-and-abuse/

Stop menacing us with your

“I was raped by a priest” complaints!

File this under oh my god:

[T]here’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.

That’s William Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, explaining the Catholic Church’s new “get tough” strategy to silence and shut down those meanie rape and abuse victims and their advocates, by trying to bury SNAP in a barrage of costly and irrelevant legal proceedings.

SNAP is the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. According to the New York Times, it has three paid staff members, and its revenue in 2010 was a whopping $ 352,903. In other words, compared to the mighty Catholic Church, it’s a pretty small, not-very-well-funded organization that exists solely to support those who’ve been victimized by the Church. Which means, according to Donohue, that SNAP is “a menace to the Catholic Church.”

There’s more to this new “get tough” strategy:

He said bishops were also rethinking their approach of paying large settlements to groups of victims. “The church has been too quick to write a check, and I think they’ve realized it would be a lot less expensive in the long run if we fought them one by one,” Mr. Donohue said.

Yes, that’s the whole problem with how the Church covered up its priests who raped and molested children. It was too quick to write checks to the victims. So much more cost-efficient for the Church to instead spend the money trying to shut down the victims’ support groups.

But it’s not like it’s a national strategy or anything. Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said so. And besides, the Church would never be less than truthful about its coordinated attempt to silence its victims.

All of this new “get tough on rape and molestation victims” strategy is happening, of course, in the context of the Catholic bishops, and even the pope himself, whining that Americans are not showing proper deference to the Church’s moral teachings and beliefs. Last week, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York, penned a letter to his “brother bishops,” in which he complained that “religious freedom is under attack” and insisted, “We did not ask for this fight, but we will not run from it.” He even suggested that bishops might have to “engage in civil disobedience and risk steep fines” in order to protect their “religious freedom.”

This is fight is the fight to prevent women from using contraception and to try to regain some influence over American Catholics, who increasingly ignore the edicts of their Church. The more the bishops insist that their definition of morality is the definition to which our laws must adhere, the fewer people listen and the more desperate the bishops become.

Because women’s health care is an affront to the bishops and their beliefs and requires all of their resources. You know, except the ones not devoted to silencing those meanie victims of rape and abuse and their supporters who are a menace to the Church.