ST. LOUIS (MO)
Flatland/Kansas City PBS [Kansas City MO]
November 24, 2024
By Bill Tammeus
St. Louis man, David G. Clohessy, cites better victim support and resistant bishops among wins and losses in efforts to change the Catholic Church
A 2002 series of Boston Globe articles turned a scandal about Catholic priests who sexually abuse children (and bishops who protect those priests) into a national story.
The Globe, however, wasn’t the first newspaper to expose this reprehensible crime. Credit for that goes to the independent, Kansas City-based National Catholic Reporter. NCR was writing about this years before the Globe.
But, developments in this scandal evolve slowly. Just a few weeks ago, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, 10 years after it was created, issued its first report, concluding that the church still fails to ensure that abuse cases are dealt with adequately and saying that the Vatican office charged with processing complaints is slow and secretive.
Nothing New
None of this surprises David G. Clohessy, who lives in St. Louis but whose work frequently brings him to Kansas City. He’s been trying to ensure victims are heard and church officials are held accountable. He’s former national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, and currently volunteer director of Missouri SNAP.
Clohessy, a priest abuse victim as a child in Moberly, Missouri, knows much historical context about this scandal and can describe what’s worked and what’s changed. (Not surprisingly, he and SNAP have made enemies within the church, but he’s persisted in this work.)
“The fundamental achievement,” he says, “is just the fact that tens, or maybe hundreds of thousands, of childhood sexual abuse victims feel less alone, less ashamed, less confused. Many survivors now know there’s someplace they can turn to for help.”
His abuse, he says, began with “a very familiar pattern.” The perpetrator “ingratiated himself into our family, befriended my parents, and ended up molesting me and three of my siblings, one of whom became a priest and went on to molest kids himself.”
Successes and Failures
Clohessy suppressed those memories until about age 30, but then got help. He met SNAP founder Barbara Blaine and his life’s focus changed. After decades of SNAP work, Clohessy cites accomplishments as well as failures. But let’s begin with gains.
“In the broader society,” he says, “there’s been an enormous amount of progress. Not enough, but an enormous amount. In general, now families are less inclined to entrust their kids to any grownup who happens to have a respectable position or title. I think kids are a little bit more apt to recognize what happens to them as abuse and a little bit more inclined to tell. Mom and Dad are more apt to believe them and to call secular officials rather than church figures. And police and prosecutors, judges, and juries are much more inclined to believe survivors than ever before. All of that is incredibly positive. And I think survivors tend to get an awful lot more support — though not enough — than in years past.”
But much work remains.
“What hasn’t changed,” he says, “is church hierarchy. Well, that’s not quite true. They have changed, but I would argue that when you’re caught doing wrong you have two choices: You can either stop doing wrong or you can work harder and smarter to conceal it. I think a majority of Catholic bishops have chosen the latter course. They’ve decided that the thing to do is to be more shrewd at keeping secrets secret.
“One thing that clearly has not changed in the Catholic context is that the church always has been and, I fear, will always be a monarchy. If this scandal had happened in any other setting — business, nonprofit, government — there’d be reform at the top because otherwise those institutions wouldn’t survive. But in a monarchy, the king can engage in all kinds of wrongdoing and then make all kinds of promises and renege on them or ignore them and suffer no consequences.
“That’s why the church hierarchy hasn’t changed. Bishops looked around and saw a couple of cases where bishops had to face tough questioning under oath in court about how much they knew and how little they did to stop abuse. And those are the handful of bishops that got in trouble.
“The rest of the bishops learned that if you don’t have to be deposed and/or that the deposition won’t be made public . . . you’re in the clear. Catholic outrage isn’t going to drum you out of office and the Vatican isn’t going to demote, discipline, or defrock you. The only time you get in trouble, like Bishop (Robert) Finn, in Kansas City, is when you get dragged into a courtroom. So you do everything you can to avoid that.”
Looking Back
Clohessy has regrets and satisfactions about SNAP’s work: “We spent the first 15 years of SNAP naively believing that if only church officials knew and understood, they would change. Obviously, that proved not to be the case. We kept saying to church officials, ‘Look, why don’t you just have a national abuse policy?’ They would laugh and look at us in a condescending, disbelieving kind of way and say, ‘That’s not how the bishops operate. We can’t have a national sexual abuse policy.’ But it turned out that they could have one. That was a big win.
“Secondly, since 2002 we repeatedly pressured bishops to at least name the perpetrators. And now all but about a dozen Catholic bishops do have on their websites a list of predator priests. The lists are inaccurate, inadequate, and sometimes hard to find, but at least thousands and thousands of once dangerous or potentially dangerous child-molesting clerics’ names are out there in the public.
“Then in 2002, we began working very hard on the statute of limitations. Now 25 states have created these one-, two- or three-year windows of time in which victims — no matter when they were abused, no matter where or by whom — can use the court system to expose not only those who committed abuse but also those who concealed the abuse. So that’s been huge.”
Financial Strategy
But another problem has been dioceses and other Catholic entities declaring bankruptcy. When that happens, Clohessy says, “the whole focus shifts from who molested kids and who covered it up to how do we divvy up dollars. It prevents depositions, discovery, lawsuits, and trials. It’s the latest and arguably the most shrewd and effective legal effort by bishops to keep secrets secret.”
Beyond that, the severe shortage of priests, Clohessy says, makes bishops less eager to get rid of abusers, so church members must play a role:
“What I would encourage people to realize is when you see or suspect abuse, you can go the secular route or the church route. When you go the church route, that’s when the coverup can begin or intensify. The smart, safe thing to do is go the secular route, using the law enforcement and the justice system.
“At the very minimum, if you’re lucky and persistent, you can at least get your perpetrator’s name in the public so it’s less likely they’ll get another position around kids. Complacency protects nobody.”
Sexual abuse has happened in other religious traditions, of course. But its persistence in Catholicism has seemed different. Still, imagine how much worse things would be without people like Clohessy working to protect victims.
Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website, book reviews for The National Catholic Reporter and The Presbyterian Outlook. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at wtammeus@gmail.com.