MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

Madeleine Baran St. Paul, Minn. Sep 15, 2014

A group of tenured theology professors at the University of St. Thomas sent a letter to embattled Archbishop John Nienstedt on Saturday urging him to “leave the legal talk to the lawyers” and reach out to lay people to repair the spiritual harm caused by the year-long clergy sex-abuse scandal.

“We believe that without such public steps the pastoral state of the archdiocese is not sustainable,” they wrote. “The Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis has had a distinguished place in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. The current crisis is a grave blot on that history. Legal action alone will not remove it.”

The letter, signed by 12 of the private Catholic university’s 21 tenured theology professors, does not call for Nienstedt’s resignation. Instead, it asks him to change his approach to the…