Abandoned Altars

This weekend, SNAP’s National Conference will be held in Chicago. Since the demise of the Linkup, this is the biggest and most important event around for victims and survivors. Unfortunately, a recent illness has kept me from attending, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it.

Lately, I’ve been watching more news clips from when the crisis started back in 1992. There was a fascinating Oprah program very early on, in September or thereabouts of 1992. It featured several victims including David Clohessy, as well as Richard Sipe, and a bunch of people I recognized in the audience – Jeanne Miller, Tom Economus, Nancy Briggs, etc. Most are long gone but there are a few who might be there at the Conference right now.

Once again, though, I was struck by how much was exposed in plain view right at the very beginning of the crisis. Sipe was already proclaiming that the reason the Church was so scared of exposure because abuse “went to the highest echelons of the Church”. We still haven’t seen just how high it really goes…

There were some incredible horrible stories by victims. One guy whose name I forget was not only handcuffed and hogtied by his perpetrator, he was later taken to over 17 priests by the guy to confess that he’d had sex with a priest – and not a single one of them said anything to anyone, or even advised him to report it.

Sixteen years later, the whole thing seems a strange historical curiosity. But I recall how outraged I was then. That anger’s gone, not so much from recovery, but from having been beaten down by almost two decades of Church stonewalling or mouthing pious proprieties, secret settlements, sheeple’s lame excuses, and all the rest. One gets tired and out of breath shouting from the rooftops all these years.

I think, however, that we need our outrage. I’ve been connecting dots and the pattern I’m seeing is of such monstrous criminality the very stones of the altars should cry out in horror.

So, you folks at the SNAP Conference, while you’re having fun and all that, please take a minute or two to recall WHY you’re there. Remember what happened to you. Recall the victims who didn’t become survivors but died in despair, from suicide, drugs, alcohol, or sexual disease. And remember that NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

And when that fire starts burning again in your guts, you’ll know how much more we have left to do.