BishopAccountability.org
	Catholics Seek Help Sending Abuse Victims to Conference By Marie Szaniszlo Boston Herald [Boston MA] May 26, 2005 A group of Boston-area Catholics has started a unique scholarship fund to help pay for clergy sexual-abuse victims to attend a national survivors conference. BishopAccountability.org, the largest online archive on the crisis in the Catholic Church, is soliciting donations for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. SNAP's third annual conference will be held June 10 to 12 in Chicago, but not all victims can afford the roughly $500 airfare, registration fee and hotel expense. "What strikes me again and again is the nearly superhuman strength it takes for survivors to come forward and risk public humiliation," said Anne Barrett Doyle, one of the Web site's directors. "Without their courage, the scandal would never have been exposed." A mother of four from St. Agnes parish in Reading, Barrett Doyle first met a survivor in 2002 when she went to confront Boston's former archbishop, Bernard Cardinal Law, after reading media reports about a priest he had repeatedly transferred from parish to parish, knowing that he had molested children. "Courage failed me," she said, and she did not confront Law. But her meeting with the survivor lead to other meetings and eventually a trip to SNAP's first national conference, where other survivors told similarly heart-rending stories. "It was both sacred and unbearable. It was absolutely searing," Barrett Doyle said.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.