BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
By Dan Adams | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MARCH 24, 2014
When Barbara Blaine founded the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests in a Chicago homeless shelter she ran in 1988, it was a small group looking for support and healing.
It was more than a decade before public outrage at sex abuse in the Catholic church peaked in the early 2000s, and SNAP’s members had few people they could turn to except each other.
Twenty-five years later, the organization is considered by many Catholic observers to be the main American advocacy group for victims of clergy abuse. But support groups remain at the core of SNAP’s work.
“I don’t think any of us thought when we started that we would still be doing it now,” said Blaine, who visited Boston on Sunday as part of a tour marking the group’s quarter-century of work. “I never imagined that there were so many kids sexually violated by priests.”
Blaine was invited to Boston by child advocacy group Massachusetts Citizens for Children, or MassKids, which hosted an afternoon of lectures at the New England School of Law to mark SNAP’s anniversary.
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