Phil Donahue gave support to clergy sex abuse survivors like us
BY DAVID CLOHESSY
August 26, 2024
Phil Donahue was to talk show hosts as Fr. Andrew Greeley was to priests and Jason Berry is to print journalists: the first in his field to credibly address the Catholic Church's then virtually unspoken problem of pedophile priests.
(At great risk, of course, the National Catholic Reporter was the first newspaper with a national circulation to write about abuses and cover-ups, before both Donahue and Greeley. The two men — and years later, many others — clearly read and were inspired by the NCR's seminal work exposing this corruption.)
The internet wasn't around back then and my memory isn't flawless, so it's possible that, technically speaking, other outlets may have discussed the abuse crisis even earlier than Donahue (perhaps an ultraconservative Wisconsin-based weekly called The Wanderer, for instance).
But none had anything like the reach and impact of "The Phil Donahue Show" (later shortened to just "Donahue").
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, Donahue, who died Aug. 18, 2024, at age 88, had the largest daytime audience in the country, attracting 9 million viewers every day.
In addition to his extraordinary reach, Donahue also enjoyed enviable credibility. On this topic in particular, his credibility was enhanced by the respectful way that he spoke about his Catholic upbringing and education at a private all-boys high school and the University of Notre Dame.
When Donahue, Greeley and Berry began digging into and discussing the abuse of kids by clerics in the 1980s, in fact, the crisis was nowhere near being called or considered a crisis. At best, the few who knew anything about the phenomenon considered child molesting clerics just a very few "bad apples" in an enormous barrel of selfless priests, nuns and bishops.
Unlike other similar shows, Donahue didn't report on a specific abuser or diocese. Instead he took the first in-depth examination of the scandal across the U.S. church. And he did so with remarkable sensitivity.
In 1988, his first show on the topic, Berry recalls, featured New Mexico psychiatrist Dr. Jay Feireman, who treated clergy offenders, reporter Carl Cannon, who had just done the first nationally syndicated series about pedophile priests for the Knight-Ridder chain, and Louisiana parents whose son had been sexually assaulted by notorious serial predator Fr. Gilbert Gauthe.
And on his second show about clergy abuse, Donahue described SNAP's mission and work, opening with a long segment respectfully and sensitively interviewing SNAP president and founder Barbara Blaine. (About our support groups, Donahue — with a slight but noticeable incredulity in his voice — said, "You are encouraging Catholics similarly situated, loved ones of Catholics, victims, parents, whatever it may be, to come together and you respect their privacy and you literally take over a hotel, not unlike a convention.")
Read the full story at ncronline.org: