MINNESOTA
Duluth News Tribune

By: Madeleine Baran, MPR.org/100.5 FM

When beloved priest Harry Walsh retired two years ago, parishioners of St. Henry’s Catholic Church in Monticello, Minn., decorated a VFW hall with paper shamrocks and musical notes to say goodbye.

They sang, gave speeches and cried. Walsh, then 77, had served as the parish’s music minister for nearly a decade.

“You developed close personal relationships with everybody and that gave us all the ability to trust you with all of our personal lives,” one person wrote on a tribute website for the Irish-born priest. “You have blessed this community immeasurably.”

But Walsh had a secret. He’d been accused of sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl and 12-year-old altar boy decades earlier, resulting in a financial settlement for the girl, according to church documents obtained by MPR News. Nonetheless, Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis archbishops Harry Flynn and John Nienstedt…