When Dan McNevin was nine years old, he served as an altar boy to Father James Clark in Corpus Christi Church in Fremont, California. There he worshipped alongside generations of his Irish Catholic family, attending mass and answering phones for the parish office. At first, says McNevin, now 60, Clark was "grooming him." But soon the priest began to abuse him both physically and emotionally, undressing, touching, and assaulting him. He didn't tell anyone, including his parents, for more than a decade. After three years, McNevin left the church forever; Clark did not.
Decades later, McNevin, then in his forties, confronted Clark's superiors in the Oakland diocese, which governs all Catholic churches in the Alameda and Contra Costa counties, including Fremont. He says the area bishop told him the priest did not have a history of abuse, although he was a convicted sex offender, and denied shuffling him between posts (one way the Catholic church protects alleged abusers). McNevin believed the diocese—until he learned that the leaders of the same diocese had transferred a different offender 11 times. Then, in 2002, he met a survivor who had been molested by Clark five years after his own abuse. "I knew I got lied to," he says. McNevin sued the Oakland diocese alongside several other victims, settling in 2005.
He works now as an area leader for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests(SNAP), a grassroots non-profit organization dedicated to helping victims of clergy abuse deal with their trauma. For survivors who've kept their abuse secret, media coverage publicizing the offender's crimes can be both triggering and validating. It's a duality McNevin is himself familiar with: He still remembers the first time he saw his abuser's name in print—once when he sued the church, later when he was quoted in an article detailing the church's complicity in Clark's crimes. The most recent of these came earlier this week, when the law firm Anderson & Associates published a report identifying 212 priests accused of sexual abuse in the Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose dioceses.
[For more on this story by EMILY MOON, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...vors-overcome-trauma]
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