Anger As Catholic Website Shares Name of Abuse Survivors" Site

By Barney Zwartz
The Age
October 29, 2012

http://www.theage.com.au/national/anger-as-catholic-website-shares-name-of-abuse-survivors-site-20121029-28fox.html

IN WHAT victims of clergy sex abuse fear is a deliberate slight or something more sinister, the Salesian Catholic religious order is running a website with the same name as the world's biggest group of clergy abuse survivors.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, plans to ask the Salesians to change the name of their Salesian News Australia Pacific, also SNAP.

SNAP Australia co-leader Mark Fabbro said yesterday that the victims’ group, which has 12,000 members worldwide and was set up in the late 1980s, saw it as an attempt to make it hard for people reaching out for help to find the SNAP support website. "We don’t want victims ending on the Salesian website when they need support," he said.

But last night the Australia-Pacific head of the Salesians said the order intended no affront and would consider changing the website title to avoid confusion.

Father Greg Chambers said the suggestions by the Survivors Network had no merit. The order chose SNAP because it was a catchy title for readers, and the website had been operating since 2009.

Survivors Network co-leader Nicky Davis said: "Victims find that name incredibly offensive. It adds to their pain and re-emphasises how worthless they are made to feel. There’s no consideration whatsoever to how it may hurt them."

Ms Davis said it was "completely inappropriate for an order commonly known as the worst of all Catholic abusers to usurp the name of the world’s largest and best-known clergy abuse victim support group.

"This would be an unfortunate oversight if accidental.

"It would be callous in the extreme if deliberate."

The Salesians were cited on October 19 in the state inquiry into church handling of sex abuse as the most defiant and unrepentant group within the Catholic Church.

Child protection expert Patrick Parkinson, a law professor at Sydney University, told the inquiry the order had suppressed his independent report into how it moved three priests overseas to avoid police questioning.

Two, Frank Klep and Jack Ayers, went to Samoa after the then head of the order wrongly declared to authorities that Klep had no criminal record, and one, Julian Fox, went to Rome.

Professor Parkinson told the inquiry that the deputy head of the worldwide Salesians in Rome had lied to him about one of the priests.