MN--Archbishop to hold “town hall” meeting; SNAP responds
For immediate release: Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2015
Statement by Frank Meuers of Plymouth MN, SNAP director Southern Minnesota (952-334-5180, [email protected])
The temporary head of the Twin Cities archdiocese is holding a meeting to talk about a permanent head of the archdiocese. In our view, the top priority is finding an archbishop who hasn’t and isn’t hiding child sex crimes. That will be tough.
Listening to people is easy. Acting on what you hear is tougher. Tougher still is finding a new archbishop who has acted with courage and compassion in clergy sex abuse and cover up cases. But we hope this will happen.
Regardless of who takes the reins of this archdiocese, it’s important that Catholics realize that this is a long-standing, deeply-rooted crisis in which most clerics are guilty of ignoring or concealing known or suspected child sex crimes. So no new archbishop will be fully “clean.”
And no new archbishop, by himself, can quickly reverse decades of recklessness, callousness and deceit. It’s up to every single church employee and member to be vigilant and to report any information or suspicions about possible child abuse to secular authorities. It’s up to every single church employee and member to aggressively seek out anyone who may have been abused and urge them to get help from independent sources.
(SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. SNAP was founded in 1988 and has more than 20,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our website is SNAPnetwork.org)
Contact
David Clohessy (314-566-9790 cell, [email protected], [email protected]), Barbara Dorris (314-503-0003 cell, [email protected]), Barbara Blaine (312-399-4747, [email protected])
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