MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation

05/22/2015

Jennifer Haselberger

On May 19, the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis sent to all clergy the newly revised Code of Conduct for Clergy and an amazingly abbreviated ‘Archdiocesan Safe Environment Policy and Requirements’. I am posting the packet received by clergy below.

Since these documents went out, I have been asked if I would advise clergy to sign the attestation that they will abide by the Code of Conduct. My answer is ‘no’. There is nothing I would like better than to see policies promulgated in this Archdiocese that would improve the safety of children and vulnerable adults. In my opinion, these policies will do little to achieve that goal. More importantly, they are overly broad, lack specificity, and confuse concepts and principles in such a way as to make them largely unworkable. Bad policies (as we have seen repeatedly in the Archdiocese of…