Noted journalist and conservative activist Don Feder is sounding the alarms over the causes and effects of plummeting birthrates, aging populations and the disintegration of family life. Check out his new website, StopDemographicWinter.com. Bill Donohue serves on his board of advisors.
In 2017, a 6-year-old girl told her mom that the man next door showed his genitals to her and fondled her. After he was arrested, French authorities searched his home and found hundreds of thousands of child porn pictures, as well as videos featuring bestiality and excrement. They also found a diary where he detailed what he did to his victims. The pervert was not some demented idiot—he was a surgeon.
In 2020, he was sentenced to prison, and on May 23 a French court found Joël Le Scouarnec guilty of raping and sexually assaulting 299 children; he was sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison. He admits that his first sexual offense took place in 1985 when he raped his 5-year-old niece. It appears that he took after his father, who sexually assaulted his own grandson, namely Joël’s son. “I reproduced in many children what my father did to my son,” the former surgeon said.
Why wasn’t he punished sooner? In 2005, he was convicted for possessing and importing child porn; he was sentenced to four months of suspended prison time. His medical license was not suspended and he was not barred from interacting with children. We now know that from 1989 to 2014, he raped hundreds of boys and girls in hospitals, the average age being 11. Most were unconscious or sedated.
How could he do such things? “I didn’t see them as people.” He is telling the truth. When Albert Speer, second in command to Hitler, was asked how he could kill so many Jews, he said he didn’t hate Jews. “I depersonalized them,” he said. Le Scouarnec also confessed that he “acted without any qualms,” thus confirming his sociopathic status.
Pornography, especially hard-core child porn, desensitizes its consumers, making it possible for them to treat human beings as subhuman. Indeed, Le Scouarnec readily admitted, “I was addicted to viewing child pornography.” But there are other factors that also played a role.
French law is very relaxed when it comes to sex between adults and minors. Up until fairly recently, there was no age of consent in France—now it’s 15. Currently, men who have sex with minors have legal rights—they cannot be charged with rape unless they engage in “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise.” In other words, if a 15-year-old girl is coaxed into having sex with a 25-year-old man, there are no penalties for the guy.
Law often follows changes in the culture, and as such we need to inquire why French laws governing sexuality are so lax. To do that we need to examine the thinking of French intellectuals on these matters.
Recall that Le Scourarnec started his rape rampage in the 1980s. A decade earlier, in 1977, French intellectuals signed a petition addressed to the French Parliament calling for the end to age of consent laws. Sex between adults and kids, they said, should be legal. The signatories were a “Who’s Who” of intellectuals.
One of those savants was author Gabriel Matzneff. In 2020, he published a book about his sexual adventures with young boys and girls. He also admitted to having sex with eight-year-old boys in the Philippines. But this was not the first time he came clean. He openly bragged about these exploits for years, going on TV to discuss them. Not only did he do no jail time, he became the hero to the literati.
Matzneff learned the central lesson of the social revolution in France—“It’s forbidden to forbid.” He took that 1968 message to heart, saying, “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience.”
Those who also signed the petition included such notables as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. All of them were sexually promiscuous. Foucault, a reckless homosexual, went further, justifying rape.
Other signatories included Felix Guattri, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière and Giles Deleuze.
Guattri joined the Communist Party when he was a young man, and while he later quit, he never stopped promoting the politics of the left, focusing on the need for a sexual revolution. Lyotard was a postmodernist, an atheist who denied the existence of truth. Rancière believed in the “equality of intelligence,” telling his happy students that an ignorant person could teach another ignorant person. Deleuze was praised for his intellect by Foucault, but it didn’t pay dividends in the end—he committed suicide by jumping out the window of his Paris apartment.
Did these intellectuals cause Le Scouarnec to become a monster predator? Not directly. It’s more complicated than that. They certainly had nothing to do with his upbringing. But they did help create a milieu where legal and social norms governing sexual expression became so relaxed as to be practically non-existent. Thus did they make it easier for a very sick man to get away with his history of rape and assault with impunity.
Evil does not occur in a vacuum. When perverts like Matznetff are applauded by the deep thinkers, it seeds the social soil for men like Le Scouarnec to act “without any qualms.”
A recent Pew Research Center survey of Catholics concluded that they want the Catholic Church to be “more inclusive.” But do they?
No sooner are we told that “Most U.S. Catholics Say They Want the Church to be ‘More Inclusive’” when we learn how seriously qualified that conclusion is. What matters is whether Catholics are practicing or not.
Before going any further, it is legitimate to ask the obvious: If Catholics do not practice their religion, can they really be counted in a poll on Catholics? Are vegetarians really vegetarians if they say they are, but readily admit to enjoying hot dogs and hamburgers?
As Pew reports, practicing Catholics and non-practicing Catholics have little in common. The former are much more accepting of Church teachings on an array of issues; the latter are not. For example, the majority of Catholics who attend Mass weekly say the Church should not allow women to become priests, and two-thirds say the Church should not recognize gay and lesbian marriages. Those who are not regular Church-goers favor both.
The Catholic League commissioned a survey of Catholics in 1995, 2015 and 2022. Above all, we were interested in learning whether Catholics wanted the Church to hold to traditional teachings, or adopt a much more relaxed stance. We found out, as did Pew, that Catholics are conflicted: when asked about specific issues, both practicing and non-practicing Catholics tend to adopt a more liberal position. However, when asked about the advisability of abandoning traditional teachings for a more inclusive interpretation, they balk.
In the Pew survey published this spring, it found that 53 percent of U.S. Catholics who attend Mass weekly say the Church should stick to its traditional teachings, even if that means it gets smaller. This was exactly the position taken by Pope Benedict XVI. Indeed, he believed that a smaller Church was a better Church. Commenting on this observation, Pope Francis called Benedict a “prophet” for predicting the Church would become a smaller, but more faithful, institution.
This vision of a smaller but better Church flies in the face of a “more inclusive” Church.
In 1995, the Catholic League survey reported that 33.8 percent of Catholics (both practicing and non-practicing) said the Church should “conform to modern day opinion of its members,” but 51.8 percent said it should “stick to founding principles and beliefs.” Practicing Catholics were the most supportive of the latter position.
In 2015, the same question was asked, and the results were similar: 52 percent said the Church should not change and 38 percent disagreed. In 2022, 56 percent said it is better to “stick to principles and beliefs” and 33 percent said it would be better to “conform to modern-day opinions.”
This shows a consistency that is as striking as it is encouraging. Despite the strong secular bent of the dominant culture, most Catholics—especially those who regularly attend Mass—do not want to belong to a Church that “goes with the flow.”
This contradicts the conventional narrative about Catholics wanting more “inclusivity.” It also contradicts the notion that the Church needs to be more “relevant.” In fact, the more “relevant” any religion is today, the more irrelevant it is in the eyes of its adherents—they are losing members the fastest. Meanwhile, orthodox strains within every religion are doing the best.
Why does it matter so much to survey houses like Pew that they keep on polling Catholics to see if they reject the Church’s teachings, especially on women and sexuality? Because it provides ammo for those who are pressing the hierarchy about the need to change and get with the times.
This smacks more of a political agenda than a scientific enterprise. The latest Pew survey proves it.
It sampled 1787 Catholics, 531 of whom attend Mass weekly or more often. Of the 1254 who attend Mass less often, most of them—1088—attend yearly or less often [note: adding the numbers results in 1785]. Imagine a survey of vegetarians, the vast majority of whom admit to liking franks and burgers! Would we not expect that most of them think it’s time to lighten up? Moreover, Pew interviewed far more women (999) than men (784). This matters because women Catholics are much more liberal than men.
The Catholic Church is not a democracy, nor does it aspire to being one. Ergo, attempts to judge it by democratic indices are meaningless, if not absurd. The Church is engaged in the pursuit of truth, and as such it is not amenable to popular opinion.
A group of Christians hold a pro-family rally in Seattle and are attacked by Antifa anarchists for doing so.
This is exactly the kind of incident that President Trump’s Commission on Religious Liberty needs to investigate. He set up a task force on anti-Christian bias, and the Catholic League has been working with this unit, supplying documentation and other information. We are contacting their lawyers today.
On Saturday, May 24, a Christian pro-family group, Mayday USA, held one of its #DontMessWithOurKids rallies in Seattle. They were there to combat the radical transgender movement which is exploiting vulnerable young people. It didn’t take long before they were assaulted by the counter-protesters.
The Antifa counter-protesters wore their signature black-clad garb and masks, and some exposed themselves publicly. The pro-family rally was held in Cal Anderson Park, in the heart of the LGBTQ community. The mayor, Bruce Harrell, a Democrat, blamed the pro-family group, saying they “inspired violence,” yet all 23 of those arrested were from the Antifa-led counter-protesters. Moreover, the rally’s organizers said they never wanted this venue, arguing that they tried to hold their event in a different neighborhood.
The pro-LGBTQ anarchists waved transgender flags and threw water bottles and other objects at the police. Some jumped the police barrier and assaulted the cops; one officer was taken to a hospital for treatment. They called their protest “Keep Your Bibles Off Our Bodies,” saying their goal was to fight “fascist family values.”
One of the pastors who led the pro-family rally, Russell Johnson, wrote on X that the Seattle mayor “owes Christians in WA State an apology for his bigoted remarks after folks who were holding a peaceful worship event at Cal Anderson Park were violently assaulted for the high crime of expressing their deeply held religious beliefs in the form of a permitted worship event on city property.”
Anti-Christian violence needs to be condemned and those responsible for it must be brought to justice. The Department of Justice is empowered to address this incident and it is our hope that they will do so with dispatch. They can begin by questioning the mayor, asking him to explain why he was more condemnatory of the non-violent protesters than he was the violent extremists who went on a rampage.
Last week, Pope Leo XIV addressed Catholic teachers, making plain that his idea of education transcends the ABC’s. He implored them to “dedicate yourselves to the formation of the young with enthusiasm, fidelity and a spirit of sacrifice.”
He specifically spoke to the issue of values. “What, in the world of youth today, are the most urgent challenges to be faced? What values are to be promoted?”
From a Catholic perspective, the values that young people adopt must be grounded in obligations to others. This is difficult these days given the cultural emphasis on self-absorption. Indeed, focusing “on the other” is a radical idea in many parts of the world.
The Holy Father nicely summarizes the challenges that await young people. “Think of the isolation caused by rampant relational models increasingly marked by superficiality, individualism and emotional instability; the spread of patterns of thought weakened by relativism; and the prevalence of rhythms and lifestyles in which there is not enough room for listening, reflection and dialogue, at school, in the family, and sometimes among peers themselves, with consequent loneliness.”
In sounding the alarms over individualism and relativism, Leo sounds more like Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI than Pope Francis. His statement comes at a time when parents are struggling with the allure that technology has for their children.
A new study of young people and their parents found that “Two-thirds (67%) of parents fear they’re losing precious moments with their children due to screen addiction.” Indeed, parents spend almost 100 hours fighting with their kids over screen time every year. It is so bad that 41 percent of moms and dads are afraid they’re “losing their little ones’ childhood to technology completely.”
Screen addiction is isolating, resulting in the loneliness that Leo warns about. Social media may bind some people together, but it also causes much consternation, especially for girls.
There needs to be a national discussion about this issue. Unless parents and teachers pay as much attention to character formation as they do standard pedagogical concerns, they are doing young people a disservice.
Stanford University professor William Damon faults the public schools for their refusal to provide for citizenship education. He notes that the Obama administration “closed down the Department of Education’s character education desk as soon as it took office.”
This was a very serious attack on young people. “Although most parents would like to see schools impart values such as honesty and responsibility to their children,” Damon writes, “character education in public education has been hindered by progressive resistance to instruction that makes claims about right and wrong in the face of cultural variation (even when such claims focus on values such as truth and obligation that virtually all cultures respect).”
What Pope Leo XIV told Catholic teachers needs a much bigger audience. All students, in every school, public, private or parochial, need character formation. An educated, but virtue starved, student is no asset to society.
Respecting separation of church and state is a two-way street. That is the occasion for this letter. Contact: noel.frame@leg.wa.gov
May 20, 2025
Sen. Noel Frame
220 John A. Cherberg Building
PO Box 40436
Olympia, Washington 98504
Dear Sen. Frame:
Your interest in preventing Catholic priests from being excommunicated for violating Canon law if they disclose what they have learned in the confessional is striking. This is especially noteworthy given that the bill that allows the state to crash the confessional is yours.
You see away around this problem. “We the state of Washington have a secular legislative purpose that is to protect children from abuse and neglect and if faith communities choose through their rules not to protect children from abuse and neglect, we the state are choosing not to be complicit in that choice by their rules.”
You do not cite one instance where any child has ever suffered abuse or neglect, in any state, because a priest chooses not to disclose what he has learned in the confessional. That’s largely because molesters tend not to be the kind of persons who like to “fess up.” In other words, your bill is only tangentially related to this issue: let’s face it—it is the nose of the camel in the tent, and we all know what happens after that.
Your proposal to resolve the confessional dilemma for priests is enticing. “I am reminded that Canon law has changed many times over the years in the Catholic faith and there’s nothing to say they cannot change their rules to allow the reporting of real time abuse and neglect of children. That is within their power to change and I think they should do so.”
Funny thing is I feel the same way about your state legalizing assisted suicide. Except I would recommend that state law follow Canon law.
We the Catholic Church have a theological purpose that is to protect the vulnerable from assisted suicide and that is why state legislators should choose to follow Canon law to protect such persons, as we do not want to be complicit in killing them.
I am reminded that state law has changed many times over the years in secular society and there’s nothing to say they cannot change their rules to follow Canon law and put an end to assisted suicide. That is within their power to change and I think they should do so.
My concern for the vulnerable is grounded in the data. In Washington, the majority of those who have been killed by assisted suicide are widowed, divorced or never married. Moreover, six-in-ten (59 percent) say the reason they want to be put down is because they are a “burden” on others.
Surely anyone who is truly interested in protecting kids from abuse and neglect would want to protect the vulnerable from being killed. Your interest is excommunication; my interest is execution.
Sincerely,
William A. Donohue, Ph.D.
President
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) periodically does a study of some colleges and universities, rating them on their tolerance for free speech. The 2025 report on 251 schools found that the University of Virginia ranked #1 and Harvard ranked #251.
Jesuit schools generally do poorly, and the latest study is no exception. Fordham ranked 234, Marquette was 235 and Georgetown came in at 240. Other Jesuit institutions did better: Creighton was 144, Boston College placed 189 and Loyola of Chicago ranked 209.
Other Catholic institutions of higher education did not fare very well. The University of Notre Dame placed 167, Villanova was 185, the University of Dayton registered 192, DePaul was 201, and Duquesne placed 222.
It is striking that Georgetown, year in and year out, is the least tolerant of free speech of any Catholic college or university. It is also home to two pro-abortion clubs, one at the undergraduate level and one in the law school.
There was a time, perhaps 50 years ago, when Jesuit schools were considered the cream of the crop. No more. They may still have a good reputation, but from a free speech perspective it is largely unearned. While there are many other academic indices that are important, if free speech is not valued, it raises serious questions about the extent to which indoctrination, not education, is the norm.
Parents of high school students looking at a Catholic school upon graduation may want to consult the FIRE study.
When patrons tell bartenders it is time to “86” that guy at the end of the bar, they mean he’s drunk and should be cut off. In other contexts, it might mean to nix, or to cancel, someone. It might also mean something more serious.
When James Comey aligned seashells to read, 86 47, he knew what he was doing. He sent a message to those who loathe the man who has survived two assassination attempts. It is hardly a stretch to conclude that—given his well-known hatred of our 47th president—that this was his way of signaling his wish that someone try again. After all, this is not virgin territory for Comey: he is the former Director of the FBI and he knows what to “86” someone means; he surely wasn’t suggesting that the teetotaler be cut off at the bar.
Some in the media, still burning with rage that Trump won, are covering for Comey by pretending he is being misunderstood.
“Ex-FBI Director James Comey Posted a Picture of Seashells. Now He’s Being Probed for ‘Threats’ to Trump.” Yahoo lied. No one would care if Comey simply took a picture of seashells. But that is not what he did.
Similarly, the BBC posted, “Ex-FBI Boss Investigated for Seashell Photo as Threat to Trump.”
Many media outlets, including ABC News, are saying that Merriam-Webster defines to “86” someone or something means to “get rid of” someone or something. True enough. In this instance, the someone is the president of the United States. Comey needs to be asked: What did he think would happen if someone took him seriously and tried to “get rid” of Trump?
In some popular circles, to “86” someone is to kill him. Indeed, Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang says “to 86” means “to kill, to murder; to execute judicially.”
Comey has previously shown himself to be an extremely embittered man. Now he has proven to be beyond reckless—he is salivating over the death of President Trump.
Those who think this is an exaggeration need to explain why a majority (55 percent) of self-identified “left of center” adults recently told Network Contagion Research Institute pollsters that murdering Trump is justified. Comey is playing with fire, and he knows it. He’s not a dumb man.
Few things excite the media more than a juicy sex story about Catholic priests, no matter how half-baked the story is. The latest iteration of this phenomenon came on the day Cardinal Robert Prevost became Pope Leo XIV. Wasting no time claiming he is guilty of covering up priestly sexual abuse was SNAP (Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests).
On May 8, it slammed the new pope for the way he addressed accusations of priestly sexual abuse in the United States and Peru. Indeed, six weeks before he was elected, this totally discredited association of anti-Catholic activists filed a complaint with the Vatican saying that Cardinal Prevost “harmed the vulnerable.” The facts prove otherwise.
In 2000, when Father Prevost was the provincial supervisor in Chicago for the Augustinians, he allowed a suspended homosexual priest who had been accused of sexually abusing minors to reside at a rectory not far from a Catholic school. Father James Ray lived there with other priests and restrictions were placed on him.
Two years later, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued the Dallas reforms, new guidelines dealing with clergy sexual abuse. It was then that Ray was removed from the Augustinian residence, as well as from public ministry. He was tossed from the priesthood in 2012.
Now it is legitimate to question the decision to place Ray near a school, but to jump to the conclusion that this was an egregious dereliction of duty is absurd. Had Ray been put up in a hotel in a deserted part of town, Prevost’s critics would say he was left unsupervised.
The more intricate case is the one dealing with three sisters from Peru. SNAP says, “When Prevost was Bishop of Chiclayo, three victims reported to civil authorities in 2022 after there was no movement on their canonical case filed through the diocese.” They claim he “failed to open an investigation, sent inadequate information to Rome, and that the diocese allowed the priest to continue saying mass.”
None of this is true. Here’s what happened.
In April 2022, three sisters made accusations about two priests to church authorities about sexual abuse (inappropriate touching) dating back to 2007 when they were minors. The bishop of Chiclayo was Msgr. Robert Prevost.
Contrary to what SNAP reports, the priest was removed from the parish where he worked and prohibited from exercising his ministerial duties.
Also contrary to what SNAP reports, Prevost met with the women in April 2022 and encouraged them to take their case to civil authorities. Meanwhile he opened a canonical probe. He also offered them psychological help.
In July 2022, Prevost contacted the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith after the investigation was completed. A Vatican probe found that the allegations lacked sufficient evidence to warrant further action. Moreover, the statute of limitations had long expired. In addition, the civil investigation was also dismissed for lack of evidence and because the statute of limitations had expired.
The women weren’t satisfied and registered another complaint. The diocese responded by sending further documentation to the Vatican. (In April 2023, Msgr. Prevost was named Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome.)
In November 2023, Ana Maria Quispe, the oldest of the sisters, contended that both the civil and ecclesiastical courts were wrong. She started a social media campaign to keep her account alive.
The case was then reopened by the Apostolic Administrator in Chiclayo, addressing her complaint. Victims were summoned to meet but Quispe never showed up.
Meanwhile, there was another development happening, one which SNAP is deadly silent on.
In April 2024, after Archbishop José Eguren, a member of an ultra-conservative movement, the Peruvian Sodalitium of Christian Life, was ousted—he was accused of abuse and financial wrongdoing—accusations of a Cardinal Prevost coverup percolated.
To understand why Prevost was being accused, consider the role that Fr. Ricardo Coronado played. In May 2024, Coronado, a canon lawyer, took up the women’s cases. He was associated with this extremist movement and was widely believed to have engaged in corruption, violence and sexual abuse.
In August 2024, the Peruvian Bishops’ Conference issued a public statement saying Coronado could no longer practice canon law. He was accused of having a sexual relationship with a consenting adult.
Off-the-record comments against Coronado continued to surface from Augustinian priests. They maintained that he “despised” Prevost and that he was guilty of “a pattern of sexually inappropriate and aggressive behavior.”
In January 2025, Pope Francis and Cardinal Prevost met with one of the group’s abuse victims. Weeks before he died, the pope dissolved the movement.
Pedro Salinas, a noted Peruvian journalist who knows this issue well, said Prevost played “an extremely important role” in ending it. In fact, he said, “The campaign of disinformation and discrediting Robert Prevost’s career has always come from the source of Robert Prevost, Archbishop Eguren.”
Having written a book on this subject, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes, I can say with confidence that the accusations of a coverup by Cardinal Prevost are false. If anything, Pope Leo XIV acted fairly and with dispatch.
This article was originally written by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on Beyond These Stone Walls in May 2018
In 2009, at the same time I began writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, Catholic League President Bill Donohue invited me to write a feature article for the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst. My article, “Due Process for Accused Priests,” began by describing an important phenomenon.
In 2002, just as the national story of Catholic priests and sexual abuse emerged out of Boston to sweep the country, psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on a phenomenon called “availability bias.” It revealed the power of the media to not just report the news, but to reshape it to fit media bias, to cultivate it, to take a story’s small microphone and turn it into a megaphone.
Activist organizations have trained people to harness this force to sway what others adopt as a bias. It is not new, just newly analyzed. One of the most potent deployments of “availability bias” is one I have quoted before in these pages. It comes from Mein Kampf, the 1926 book by Adolf Hitler that gave rise to the Nazi party in Germany:
“The great mass of people will more easily fall prey to a big lie than to a small one.”
After my 2009 Catalyst article was published, I was subjected to an open assault by David Clohessy, Executive Director of the activist organization, SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Matt Abbott at Renew America forwarded my article to Mr. Clohessy and invited a response posted at Renew America entitled, “Imprisoned Priest, Sex Abuse Victim Clash.”
David Clohessy was obviously perturbed by what I exposed about the lawsuit settlement process and how it is advanced and cultivated by “self-serving contingency lawyers and various agenda driven groups using scandal for their own ends.” Mr. Clohessy had long derided Church officials for entering into secrecy agreements to keep settlement amounts from public view.
On January 17, 2017, former SNAP employee Gretchen Rachel Hammond filed a lawsuit against SNAP in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois. Ms. Hammond had been SNAP’s Director of Development before leaving the organization and filing her lawsuit. The named parties in the suit included David Clohessy, SNAP’s Executive Director, and Barbara Blaine, SNAP’s founder and president, and a member of SNAP’s board of directors.
Ms. Hammond’s lawsuit alleged that she was a victim of retaliatory discharge for questioning the allegedly corrupt practices of this organization. These included claims that SNAP and its leaders received substantial kickbacks in the form of “donations” from attorneys to whom SNAP officials referred clients or potential clients.
The lawsuit exposed that lawyers in California, Chicago, Seattle, and Delaware made major “donations,” some of them in six-figure amounts, and that SNAP leaders “concocted a scheme to have other attorneys make donations to a front foundation” to mask “attorneys’ kickbacks” to the organization.
The lawsuit also alleged a pattern of collusion between SNAP officials and plaintiff lawyers to maximize publicity for the purpose of fueling bigger payouts. It accused SNAP officials of callous disregard for the real interests of real sexual abuse survivors. Among the lawsuit’s other allegations were these:
SNAP engaged in a commercial enterprise motivated by its directors’ and officers’ personal and ideological animus against the Catholic Church.
SNAP conducted business premised on farming out abuse survivors as clients for specific attorneys who file lawsuits and collect settlements from the Catholic Church.
Attorneys routinely gave SNAP confidential plaintiff claims and other privileged information in order for SNAP to maximize payouts with sensational press releases.
SNAP claimed that it existed to provide support for survivors of clergy sexual abuse, however at all relevant times, SNAP did not have a single grief counselor or rape counselor on its payroll. SNAP would ignore survivors who reached out to SNAP for legitimate counseling.
Ms. Hammond alleged that she was told by SNAP official Barbara Dorris to ignore calls from survivors who were seeking only counseling.
Despite accepting funds for counseling and aiding survivors of sexual abuse, SNAP squandered those funds to advance its own interests and those of its leadership.
SNAP set out to deliberately jeopardize the ability of accused priests to receive due process and fair trials.
In 2011, SNAP oversaw fundraising for a charge brought against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Court at The Hague; however SNAP used the funds to pay for lavish hotels and other extravagant travel expenses for its leadership.
When the lawsuit became public, David Clohessy resigned as Executive Director, and SNAP founder and president, Barbara Blaine also resigned. They have since settled the lawsuit by a secrecy clause just like the ones for which Mr. Clohessy had railed against Catholic bishops over the last two decades.
After the settlement, others among SNAP’s more notorious leaders also resigned as reported by David F. Pierre, Jr. at The Media Report in “SNAP R.I.P.” Barbara Dorris, who replaced David Clohessy as Executive Director, and Regional Director Joelle Casteix both resigned. Among the revelations uncovered by David Pierre was that SNAP published the email addresses and personal phone numbers of accused priests to generate harassment.
Ms. Hammond’s lawsuit was only one of several brought against SNAP, but it was the one that appeared to finally expose what had long been suspected of SNAP and its leaders. Simultaneously in 2017, Father Joseph Jiang, a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, filed a defamation lawsuit against SNAP.
Charges brought against Father Jiang were heavily promoted by SNAP leaders who, as they do whenever a priest is accused, issued a public call for anyone else who wants to accuse the priest. When Father Jiang passed a polygraph test [I did, too, by the way, twice] the charges were dismissed in 2015.
In 2016 a federal judge ruled that SNAP made false statements against Father Jiang “negligently and with reckless disregard for the truth.” SNAP and the parents of the minor who had falsely accused him settled the lawsuit.
As part of its settlement, SNAP issued a public apology, but the ever complicit news media failed to mention that SNAP was forced to do so in the wake of a false claim and lawsuit. SNAP’s apology, written by its legal counsel, included this statement:
“The SNAP defendants never want to see anyone falsely accused of a crime. Admittedly, false reports of clergy sexual abuse do occur. SNAP apologizes for false or inaccurate statements… its representatives made which in any way disparaged Father Joseph Jiang.”
In reporting this story, some Catholic media outlets continued to refer to SNAP as “a victims’ support group” or “a victim advocacy group.” It’s a bad habit that blindly gives legitimacy of purpose to SNAP which it does not have, and has never had.
The most important and visible source exposing SNAP’s corruption and reckless disregard for truth is a document by Catholic League President Bill Donohue entitled, “SNAP Implodes.” It provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the path of destruction SNAP and its leaders have left in the Church and priesthood under the false guise of advocating for real victims.
Among the most manipulative of David Clohessy’s “advocacy” was an instruction to accusers to attend SNAP press conferences. To play on the emotions of reporters, Clohessy urged those awaiting settlements to “display holy childhood photos” before the news cameras, and… “If you don’t have compelling holy childhood photos we can provide you with photos of other kids that can be held up for the cameras.”
If that doesn’t infuriate Catholics who have any regard left for truth, then what would? SNAP had a much worse perversion of justice than was first hyped, and then covered up, by the news media. It was the most destructive publicity stunt SNAP and its leaders have devised or condoned to date.
Both Bill Donohue and the Hammond lawsuit cited this one (see the final bullet point in Ms. Hammond’s lawsuit above). What they do not reveal is that SNAP used the false case against me to help bring it about.
I first wrote of this story in October 2011 in “SNAP’S Last Gasp! The Pope’s Crimes Against Humanity.” That was before I even knew that I was a part of this story. In 2011, SNAP and the Center for Constitutional Rights — located at 666 Broadway in Manhattan — jointly filed a “crimes against humanity” charge against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court.
The ICC is an independent judicial institution with the power to hold trials and impose sentences for the most serious crimes of international concern: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The ICC was approved by international treaty in 1998 and officially came into being on July 1, 2002, after 60 countries ratified the treaty.
The court is headquartered in The Hague, The Netherlands. Of interest, in May of 2002, President George Bush declined to sign the treaty and refused to allow the ICC to have jurisdiction over United States cases. So SNAP’s target was not U.S. Catholic priests and bishops, but the Pope himself.
SNAP duped the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights to compose and file the briefs with information provided by SNAP in collaboration with plaintiff lawyers hoping for a precedent to tap Vatican assets in their never-ending quest for big bucks. I first learned of my involvement in this story from an article by journalist JoAnn Wypijewski, in “Spotlight Oscar Hangover: Why ‘Spotlight’ Is a Terrible Film.” Here is an excerpt:
“The Center for Constitutional Rights [CCR] . . . joined with SNAP to file a grotesque brief to the International Criminal Court demanding ‘investigation and prosecution’ of the Vatican for crimes against humanity… To CCR’s shame, Father [Gordon] MacRae is specifically mentioned in that brief with respect to allegations… which prosecutors threw in at sentencing but for which there is no evidence according to the lead detective in the case [as] cited by [Dorothy] Rabinowitz.”
SNAP, apparently in retaliation for my Catalyst articles calling for independent investigation of dubious claims, fed information to the Center for Constitutional Rights that would fuel a case against the Vatican. They made no attempt to contact me or my defense, nor did they contact Dorothy Rabinowitz at The Wall Street Journal who researched and published extensively on the same story, but with a polar opposite conclusion.
And SNAP did this without attempting to contact James Abbott, the former FBI Special Agent who spent three years investigating this case before dismissing it as a fraud. (Agent Abbott’s affidavit is cited at the end of Ryan MacDonald’s recent post, “#MeToo & #HimToo: Jonathan Grover & Father Gordon MacRae” which also lays out the fraud behind this story).
In the end, to its great credit, the International Criminal Court declined to accept jurisdiction or the crimes against humanity charge against Pope Benedict XVI, but that was no surprise. Everyone involved knew that this fiasco would go nowhere, and it was never really SNAP’s goal. It was merely a publicity stunt for David Clohessy and SNAP to heighten pressure for quick and lucrative financial settlements.
The people who terrorized American Catholic priests for the last quarter century are gone now. Their fraud is exposed. Their coffers are empty. Their leaders have fled. In “SNAP Implodes,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue summed up what I had come to know at a very personal level in this moral panic that SNAP promoted and extorted for profit over the last 25 years:
“SNAP officials function as borderline gangsters out to destroy innocent persons. It is motivated by hate and exploits the very people it claims to serve. Justice demands that it be shut down by the authorities before it does any more harm.”
Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Once again, you would serve the cause of truth and justice if you share this post and ask your contacts to do the same.
