ST. LOUIS -- A victims' support group that helped force the Roman Catholic Church to confront the problem of child-molesting priests is going through upheaval of its own, including the resignations of two top leaders and a lawsuit.
Barbara Blaine, who founded the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests in 1988, stepped down as president Friday, about a month after the resignation of longtime Executive Director David Clohessy.
The changes in leadership came before and after a Jan. 17 lawsuit accusing the group of exploiting the victims it purports to serve by taking kickbacks from lawyers.
Blaine and Clohessy said their resignations were planned months ago and were unrelated to the lawsuit. They said they simply decided that it was time to step aside after decades with the nonprofit group.
But the turnover and the lawsuit have created a tumultuous time for an organization that has been one of the loudest voices holding the Catholic Church accountable for sexual abuse by priests.
The Survivors Network's new leader, Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, said the organization remains as strong as ever. Clohessy said the group's strength isn't in its leadership but in the hundreds of volunteers "who so generously work to protect kids, expose predators and help survivors."
The organization is not as visible as it was during the height of the sexual abuse scandal more than a decade ago, in part because many of the victims from decades ago have come forward and been heard, and the church, under pressure from the Survivors Network and others, is more aggressively policing itself.
Some experts, though, say the Survivors Network continues to play a vital role.
Nicholas Cafardi, a professor at the Duquesne University School of Law and former chairman of the U.S. Bishops National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Youth, said group members still have a place "in making sure the topic never does get buried again."
"They'll be relevant as long as the problem is with us," Cafardi said.
In the lawsuit, filed in Chicago, Gretchen Hammond said she learned after starting work as the Survivors Network's director of development in 2011 that the organization "does not focus on protecting or helping survivors -- it exploits them." The lawsuit alleges that the group "routinely accepts financial kickbacks from attorneys" in the form of donations in exchange for directing potential clients to those lawyers.
Blaine denied the allegations and said the lawsuit was the latest effort to silence the Survivors Network, whose sometimes confrontational nature, including sidewalk news conferences in front of churches and Catholic administrative offices, has angered church leaders and supporters.
"Since the beginning of [the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests], we have been fighting people trying to discredit us and attribute ulterior motives to our work," Blaine said. "This is nothing new."
The Survivors Network's work gained momentum after The Boston Globe's 2002 series of stories on pedophile priests. Today, the group has more than 25,000 members around the world, including many victims of clergy sexual abuse.
The Vatican has acknowledged the abuse and taken steps to eliminate it around the world, and the U.S. church alone has paid out more than $3 billion to victims. Last year, Pope Francis said any bishop who moves a suspected pedophile priest from one parish to another should resign, calling clerical abuse "a monstrosity."
Information for this article was contributed by Rachel Zoll of The Associated Press.
A Section on 02/07/2017