MINNESOTA
Nick Coleman: The State I’m IN
Posted by Nick Coleman on Dec 16, 2013 in Catholics, Featured | 14 comments
Update: 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.
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.
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