If the Pope Really Wants To Meet with Victims of Pedophile Priests, We Are Easy to Find

If the Pope really wants to reach out to the Vatican's adult sex crime victims, he could start by revamping the spa-like rehab centers the Church has around the country for pedophile priests, to make them available as recovery centers for the victims of the priests' crimes instead.   That's one example. 

In Santa Cruz, the Salesian Religious Order has a former campgrounds on twenty acres of beachfront property, where no thinking parent would dare send a child anymore, all that land with little cabins, in all that beautiful terrain, currently housing registered sex offender felony priests from that Order.  Why not donate land like that to survivors, and let us run recovery centers? 

It's not hard to come up with two or three things off the top of your head that the Vatican could do in response to the pedophile priest epidemic, now that the Whole World knows there are hundreds and thousands of adult victims walking around with the residue of growing up with the experience of these crimes.  If the Vatican really wanted to help victims, they'd have a thriving support network running right now for all the victims in America, and all of us would be doing a lot better than we currently are. 

It's hard to get excited when the Vatican blows its horn, releasing yet another sound byte response to the world news media, another vacuous statement that then gets replayed and repeated in every news outlet in the world and hardly a reporter asks a question to dig a little deeper.

I've been doing City of Angels Blog for 3.5 years about these crimes, and I'm easy to find as are hundreds of victims who have gone public about their cases.  Google the name of almost any of the L.A. perpetrator priests, and City of Angels blog will come up, my email address is right there in the top left column. 

 If the Pope really wanted to meet with Victims, we are easy to find.

Yet no one from the Vatican has showed up at my door, like I just won the Publisher's Clearing House, with a giant check that will change my life.  I've read a lot of the lawsuit documents from cases against the Church for sex abuse by its priests from the last two decades, and the mutual unemployability of survivors of these crimes is one reason those settlement checks these days are so large.

If the Pope really wanted to reach out to survivors, he would set up a fund to help us, instead of the situation we have today, where the only way to get any response from the Catholic Church as a survivor of these crimes is to hire a lawyer and sue them. 

The victims did not create this perpetual litigation situation, the Church did. 

The Pope could just offer us help instead of telling us through Archdiocese Victim Assistance Directors to "get a lawyer."

In fact, there are hundreds of current cases that the Church is still fighting all over the country, where new victims have come forward last few years.  The Pope could just release those cases with generosity and pastoral care and all the help that you'd expect a Christian Church to provide, but this one never has. 

The crime victims were met with nothing but animosity by the Church

Almost every one of us. 

As Bernie McDaid said in the interview we ran here Monday, a lot of victims who came forward decades ago are still in trouble, some homeless, living in shelters, drinking and drugging themselves to death.   Sure, a fraction of the Church's crime victims got settlements, but some were very small settlements,especially in the 1980s and 1990s.  The men from Boston, who pioneered global lawsuits that followed in other cities around the country, got settlements as low as $20-50 thousand.  Hardly makes up for crimes that destroyed your life.

Maybe a recovery center or two around the country. 

It's obvious, right in front of the Pope and his colleagues' plump faces, plenty of things the Vatican could do to help.  When will news media realize those sound bytes, those little quotes they all run and run and run and run, with different creative uses of internet images that are available to everyone, is not news reporting? 

There are hundreds of thousands of stories here to write about the survivors of priest sex crimes "“ and the crimes-  and almost every news writer, the most they can think of to do for a story on these crimes is to call SNAP, a nonprofit corporation that specializes in providing sound bytes and quotes, and get a sound byte and quote.

A lot of vacuous words end up filling the columns between ads on websites

(with some exceptions)

The story is not getting told.

NEWS REPORTERS are disappointing all crime victims in America, not just adult victims of pedophile priests, with the surface level, one headline one sentence reporting on these crimes.  The criminals love it that no one is really writing about what they're doing. 

If the Vatican wants to help survivors, they could fund my investigative journalism into their crimes, so the truth would come out, starting with release of all the personnel files from the Los Angeles settlements in 2007, when document release was supposedly was promised to the 510 Los Angeles plaintiffs as part of the settlement. 

It's something we'd all like to see but:

|Read here an example of why they won't change any time soon:

'You Won't Hear Anything From Rome for 3 or 4 Years,' Testifies Bishop Steinbock, and World Sees Why It Took Decades to Move Church to ActionThings Take So Long in the Vatican, shrugs John Steinbock, Bishop of Fresno, testifying in the March 2009 trial, Santillan Vs. Bishop of Fresno