MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
By Ruben Rosario
rrosario@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 04/17/2014
Many well-intentioned reports urging change are only as good as their implementation.
Which gives me an opening here to address the findings released this week by the seven-member Safe Environment and Ministerial Standards task force. The panel was assigned to look into how the local archdiocese mishandled clergy child abuse and misconduct cases in recent years and to recommend changes.
Not surprisingly, the task force found “serious shortcomings” in the way the archdiocese handled the cases of one priest found with adult pornography in his possession and another priest arrested, convicted and serving time for abusing minors while a pastor in a parish on St. Paul’s East Side.
Conducting criminal background checks on priests every six years, creating an anonymous abuse complaint hotline, making the Delegate for a Safe Environment a mandated reporter and having all misconduct allegations reviewed by the archdiocese’s Clergy Review Board were among its recommendations.
But what the task force did not do has drawn criticism for the report. A clergy victims group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said the report failed to name names or to assign blame to those who “ignored, hid, minimized or enabled heinous crimes against children.”
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