MINNESOTA
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | Jul. 18, 2014
It is time for Archbishop John Nienstedt to go.
Reading the affidavit of Jennifer Haselberger, the former chancellor of the Archdiocese of St. Paul, is grim. Caveat: A lawyer friend told me that a good defense attorney could drive several trucks through the document and that may be true. But, even if a quarter of what is asserted in that document is true, it is obvious that the Archdiocese of St. Paul has failed to live up to the bishops’ own requirements regarding the protection of children. Instances of suspected child abuse were not reported to the civil authorities. Clergy were not removed from active ministry as required by the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children. Almost every page of Haselberger’s affidavit illustrates a clerical culture that, when confronted with evidence of proven or potential sexual abuse of a minor, instinctively reacted with the thought, “poor Father.”
Archbishop Nienstedt is not the first bishop to be found ignoring or ameliorating the bishops’ own guidelines for child protection. The grand jury reports from Philadelphia showed a similar willful disregard for the Dallas norms. We all know that Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph remains the bishop of that diocese even though he could not be hired to teach Sunday school because of his prior conviction for failing to report suspected child abuse. Each of these cases damages the credibility of the entire episcopacy. Each of these cases evidences a lack of accountability. Each of these cases gives the lie to the claim, repeated again and again since Dallas, that the bishops have cleaned up the mess, that the Catholic Church is now the safest place in the world for children, that the whole sordid clergy sex abuse mess is in the rear view mirror.
It is important to draw a distinction here. There is no excusing what happened before Dallas, the systematic re-assignment of predators, the cover-ups, the failure to abide by civil law to say nothing of the moral law. But, at Dallas, the bishops of the United States recognized the problems were systemic and adopted a systematic approach to those problems, a nationwide set of standards that they applied to themselves, and establishing a system of audits to assure compliance. There really are no excuses now. One of the most damning parts of the Haselberger affidavit is the section that shows how easily the authorities in St. Paul misrepresented their compliance with the Dallas Charter.
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