A Failed Bishopric: the Servants Strike Back?

By Nick Coleman
Nick Coleman
December 16, 2013

http://www.nickcolemanmn.com/?p=10714

With comic good timing, the Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis has now been accused of playing patty fingers with the Holy Water…only it’s nothing that amusing. Instead, the Saint Paul police have opened an investigation into an allegation that John Nienstedt fingered a boy inappropriately (there are not really many ways to finger a kid appropriately) at a Confirmation ceremony in 2009.

Ish, Bish.

I am shocked — SHOCKED! — to find pederasty in here.

Really, there is no way of knowing at this point whether the charge is true, and I will put my trust in the cops to sort it out. But this is exactly the kind of thing that happens when a House of Cards is collapsing: Fingers start pointing in the darnedest directions. Whether the charge has merit, it clearly indicates disarray and skullduggery in the Bishop’s Bunker, otherwise known as The Chancery, across Summit Avenue from the great Cathedral of Saint Paul. Just Sunday, Nienstedt seemed to try to throw blame on his staff for the growing scandal in his administration. Now the staff may have struck back: It seems likely the charge that Nienstedt was careless with his Bishop’s staff may have come from his other staff, the folks who may not like the prospect of being thrown under the bus by an imperious and tone-deaf prince of the Church who has made a complete cock-up of things.

Here’s a column I wrote for a defunct newspaper in 2007 about the in-coming Archbishop’s hard-line attitude towards gays and his convicting them of mortal sin… Is that the Pot calling the Kettle black? Stay tuned.

More later. Meanwhile, here is the post I published yesterday: The dude in the Top Hat has to go; now more than ever.

That derisive laughter you heard Sunday was the response of many Twin Cities Catholics to Archbishop John Nienstedt’s pre-Christmas “apology” for letting down his flock — again. As reported by local media with a straight face, Nienstedt’s humbug homily was supposed to be taken as an effort to come clean by a guy who seems to have missed the past 30-year history of efforts to rein in sexual abuse in the Church. Nienstedt’s words weren’t an apology; they were just another cover up. This time, it was his own back end he was trying to cover.

This was an attempt to pass the buck for a lack of due diligence by a church leader who came to the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis in 2007 with a very specific agenda in mind — an agenda that was not focused on protecting the most vulnerable members of the church but on destroying the liberal bent of an archdiocese that some in Rome — including former Pope Benedict XVI — wanted to quash. Nienstedt, appointed by Benedict to replace the liberal Archbishop Harry Flynn, was just the man for the job. He already had smashed the liberal legacy of the late bishop of the Diocese of New Ulm, Minn., Raymond Lucker, who strongly supported women in the church and recommended that married men be eligible for ordination. In St. Paul, Nienstedt wasted no time cracking down on dissenters in the Twin Cities church, his actions largely focused against gays and homosexual support groups: He supported an outfit that claimed to be able to “cure” gay Catholocs, refused Communion to gay activists, ordered St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis to cease holding a “Rainbow Mass” during Twin Cities Pride week and even wrote a cranky letter to the University of Notre Dame opposing the school’s decision to invite “anti-Catholic” gay rights supporter Barack Obama to speak. At one point, the bully in the pulpit even told an anguished mom that she better be careful about supporting her gay child or she could end up in hell.

There was much more, of course: At a time of great need and growing poverty, Nienstedt squandered as much as $2 million of church funds in support of the so-called “Marriage Amendment” that would have added a prohibition against same-sex marriage to the Minnesota Constitution. The amendment was defeated in November, 2012, and its defeat came with a majority of Catholics among the No votes despite heavy-handed efforts by Nienstedt and his loyal priests to coerce Catholics not only to vote for the amendment but to repudiate their own gay family members.

You may know all of this, especially if you are a Catholic disappointed over Nienstedt’s misguided leadership. But the point is that Nienstedt’s lame non-apology apology on Sunday should not get him off the hook. It was akin to the non-apologies of a fallen politician: “I’m sorry if anyone was offended by my behavior” rather than, “I’m sorry for my behavior.” Nienstedt’s was even worse: He blamed the servants:

“When I arrived here seven years ago, one of the first things I was told was that this whole issue of clerical sex abuse had been taken care of and I didn’t have to worry about it,” he told reporters. “Unfortunately I believed that. … And so my biggest apology today is to say I overlooked this. I should have investigated it a lot more than I did. When the story started to break at the end of September, I was as surprised as anyone else.”

You got that? The leader of 600,000 Catholics is shocked — SHOCKED — to learn that an issue that has bedeviled his institution for decades, and which has cost the church hundreds of millions, damaged the lives of many of the faithful and driven millions away from their church might still in any way need to be kept guard against by a vigilant, diligent, competent leader. Nienstedt, at a church in Edina, far from the grubbier precincts where most abuse has taken place, said he understood “the indignation” of his people.

Indignation?!

I got news for the Archdiocese: Indignation hardly covers it. Outrage, anger, sadness, disillusionment? Yes.

Nienstedt is saying he asked about this pesky sex abuse thing but was glad to learn it wasn’t a bother anymore.

“I hope there is nothing to these nasty rumors, Father Bob. There isn’t? Great! I wish to devote my full attention to persecuting these dread homosexuals and trying to inveigle my way into the politics of the state.”

Perhaps the archbishop’s Edina “apology” is best interpreted as just a preliminary to his resignation. Boil it down and you get: “I dropped the ball on the church’s most persistent and damaging problem in order to pursue a deliberate political agenda aimed at crushing dissent in my church and exerting influence in the political affairs of the state. I am no longer worthy to lead this archdiocese. I quit.”

He should quit. Now. Many leading Minnesota Catholics — including influential donors — have already said so, privately and– increasingly — publicly. John Nienstedt has done tremendous damage to the Church here, he is out of step with the new Pope, Francis, who has indirectly rejected Nienstedt’s entire agenda, and he has, essentially, admitted his incompetence in his primary role as guard of his flock.

Sorry, Bish. Time to go.