UNITED STATES
Crisis Magazine
MARCH 24, 2014
by Anne Hendershott
If it is true, as novelist Don DeLillo once wrote, “The future belongs to crowds,” then the future of the Catholic Church might once have belonged to activist groups critical of the Church, like Boston-bred Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). With savvy leaders who have been able to manipulate a media that is desperate for sensational stories of priestly misconduct, these organizations continue to stage well-publicized demonstrations and protests throughout the country in order to demand changes in the Church. But, the question remains, does anyone—beyond the media—take them seriously any more?
In their most recent attempt to humiliate Church leaders, Barbara Blaine, president of SNAP teamed with a few local members of the Bridgeport, CT chapter of VOTF to organize a protest—replete with the same professionally printed signs they have used for more than a decade—outside the offices of Bishop Frank Caggiano, the new Bishop of the Bridgeport Diocese. Receiving front page coverage—replete with photos of a handful of protestors holding the now-faded protest signs—in the Connecticut Post on Thursday, March 20, 2014, the headline blared, “Victims Groups Demand Investigation Into Priests.” It is difficult to take them seriously.
But, we must take them seriously because these groups continue to enlist the media as partners in persuading others that the Church is a site of secrecy and deviance. Working cooperatively with an eager media ever hungry for scandal—even if the cases occurred several decades ago—these groups are determined to continue to denigrate Church leaders who have done everything they possibly can to ensure that the clergy abuse of the past can never happen again.
The most recent target of the dissident groups is Bridgeport’s Bishop Caggiano, who in a spirit of reconciliation and good will just a month before, offered to begin a conversation with the local chapter of VOTF. At the time he announced his intention to meet with the group last month, the Bishop was heralded as a courageous visionary of the Church. The Connecticut Post published a laudatory article on February 12, 2014, praising what the reporter called his “unprecedented” decision to meet with members of VOTF. Decrying Bishop William Lori’s decision to bar VOTF from meeting in diocesan churches, the Connecticut Post quoted Jamie Dance, a member of VOTF, complaining that Bishop Lori “was secretive … [he] never answered a letter or a phone call … so it was a rather dramatic turn when we found a welcoming bishop in Frank Caggiano…. It’s practically historic.”
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