MINNESOTA
The Worthy Adversary
Posted by Joelle Casteix on October 8, 2013
In July, I blogged about how institutions should not be in the child sex abuse investigation business. Little did I know that the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis would prove me right so quickly.
Here’s a recap from what we learned yesterday from Minnesota Public Radio (emphasis mine):
Archbishop John Nienstedt was in the middle of a heated political fight over same-sex marriage in February of last year when he learned of a disturbing secret, hidden in the basement of the chancery — pornography from a priest’s computer, some of which appeared to depict children.
Canon lawyer Jennifer Haselberger had uncovered several computer discs and a white three-ring binder kept in the basement archives of the chancery building — the headquarters of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It was evidence from a 2004 internal investigation of sexually explicit images found on the computer of the Rev. Jonathan Shelley, then pastor of St. Jude of the Lake church in Mahtomedi, Minn.
Haselberger, a firebrand top official who joined the archdiocese in 2008, notified Nienstedt of the evidence, which included a report at the time from a private investigator that found that many of the depictions “could be considered illegal, because of the youthful-looking male image.”
According to church documents, the computer actually held child abuse images of boys under 14. You know, the illegal kind.
So what did Nienstedt do? He wrote letters and memos. Lots of them. He wrote to the Vatican, saying that the images could expose the Archdiocese to criminal charges. He wrote his deputies and they nit-picked over whether the images were “technically” child pornography (which many of them were). They hemmed and hawed over Canon law.
Did they call the cops? Hell, no. In fact, they fired the woman who eventually did.
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