The professional victims’ lobby met in Boston over a January weekend for the “10th Anniversary Celebration & Conference.” Shamelessly, they “celebrated” the 10th anniversary of media reports on the Boston clergy sexual abuse scandal. The speakers had quite a resume. We know from past experience what drives them.
Before the event we told the media what they should expect at this conference:
- Actors and artists would set the tone with melodramatic precision
- Activists from SNAP, along with a suspended priest, would discuss their conspiracy theories about the “evil institution”
- Two psychiatrists and a psychologist would entertain the crowd with their fully discredited notions about “repressed memory”
- Bigoted lawyers would delight the audience by drawing analogies between Islamic terrorists and the Vatican
- Reporters and columnists who are so full of hate that they can’t see straight would recount their paranoid stories.
We were right on the money. Prior to the conference, one of the speakers, Kathy Dwyer, gave priests, brothers and nuns a “heads up.” These are her exact words: “PLEASE NOTE: We are asking any clerics (male or female) who may be planning on attending the conference to, out of respect for survivors, wear street clothes only.” But the only ones who were likely to attend didn’t need to be told this anyway.
The event ended on a Sunday at Boston’s Holy Cross Cathedral. But not for the purpose of going to Mass. Fittingly, they held a demonstration. What they were demonstrating about no one really knew—the homosexual scandal effectively ended in the mid-1980s—but no doubt they still found a way to bash the Catholic Church. It’s what they do.
