MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio
[with video]
Madeleine Baran St. Paul, Minn. Apr 22, 2014
Archbishop John Nienstedt acknowledged in sworn testimony that he took steps to hide information on abusive priests and never provided complete files to police, according to a transcript released today.
• Transcript: Read the text of Archbishop John Nienstedt’s deposition (April 2, 2014)
Nienstedt made the remarks in a four-hour deposition taken April 2 as part of a lawsuit filed by a man who said he was sexually abused by the Rev. Thomas Adamson in the mid-1970s. The man alleges the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona created a public nuisance by keeping information on accused priests secret. The man’s attorneys, Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, argued that the deposition could provide evidence of a pattern of deception by the archdiocese.
Anderson and Finnegan released a partial transcript of the deposition at a news conference this morning. They said they redacted several pages that related to victims or sealed information.
“The archbishop and his predecessors have promised zero tolerance,” Anderson said, but “there has been an ongoing tolerance of sexual predators” among the clergy on the Twin Cities archdiocese.
And, generally speaking, he said, “We’re alarmed. We’re sad, and we’re scared, the more we learn, the more we see.”
Anderson said he believes Nienstedt lied under oath. “We have a serious pattern of deceit and deception by this archbishop and his predecessors,” Anderson said.
Throughout the contentious questioning, Nienstedt portrayed himself as a leader who relied on others to handle the clergy sexual abuse crisis. He professed little knowledge of the scandal within his archdiocese and said he assumed it was safe for children. Nienstedt said it “didn’t occur” to him to ask for a list of abusive priests when he arrived in 2007 and that he didn’t review any clergy files. He said he did not know that one priest had pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a boy in the 1980s or that another was receiving secret disability payments for pedophilia. Several of his statements are contradicted by internal documents obtained by MPR News.
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