UNITED STATES
Lez Get Real
Posted by: Bridgette P. LaVictoire on March 15, 2012.
The Roman Catholic Church has decided that they want to go after the leading advocacy group for those victimized by pedophile priests. Lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have sued the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests or SNAP to try and compel the group to release two decades of emails detailing correspondences with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.
The move is an attempt to cut SNAP off from those they help and bully those who might seek their help into not going to the group where the dealings are assumed to have a certain amount of confidentiality.
According to the New York Times:
The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.
Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University, stated “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”
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