MINNESOTA
Star Tribune
[list of names – St. John’s Abbey]
Article by: JEAN HOPFENSPERGER and TONY KENNEDY , Star Tribune staff writers Updated: December 9, 2013
New release expands the lists of accused priests, but advocates say many names of abusive clergy remain secret.
The list of local Catholic clergy accused of sex abuse grew longer Monday, when St. John’s Abbey of Collegeville released the names of 18 monks and allegations against a priest working at the University of St. Thomas came to light.
Most of the monks named Monday by St. John’s Abbey also were on a list made public with the settlement of a lawsuit in 2011. That list is missing several credibly accused monks, say attorneys and victims advocates. It’s also missing the monks’ work history and current residences.
“This list reflects our best efforts to identify those who likely have offended against minors,” said Brother Aelred Senna, abbey spokesman. “That task often is complicated by the passage of time, the deaths of some of those involved and sometimes incomplete accounts of the past.”
The developments come days after the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis reversed its long and tenacious resistance to identifying credibly accused clergy and produced a list of 34 priests believed to have committed acts of abuse. The church agreed to a court order releasing the names after a recent wave of new clergy sex abuse allegations that have led to the abrupt departures of several top leaders in the local church. Pressure continues to mount on other Catholic dioceses in the state to make their own lists public.
Richard Sipe, a former St. John’s monk who chaired its Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute from 1994 to 1996, said he’s disappointed that it took so long for St. John’s to make its list public. Most monks on the list had been identified by the abbey years ago, he said.
Many of the monks were in key positions of authority, Sipe said. The late Rev. Cosmas Dahlheimer was the “novice master,” and all the young monks were under his tutelage for a year, he said. The Rev. Finian McDonald served in the university’s counseling center, he said.
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