MINNESOTA
MinnPost
By Tim Gihring
The letters began arriving shortly before John Nienstedt was appointed archbishop in 2008: clean up or be shut down. It was the least that his predecessor, Archbishop Harry Flynn, could do: play the good cop; warn the rebellious parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis before the bad cop arrived.
Nienstedt seemed to relish the bad-cop role. He wore a fedora, like a G-man. Through his Rumsfeldian, half-frame glasses, he saw sin everywhere, and he revamped the Catholic Spirit, a once-freethinking archdiocesan newspaper, as a pulpit to rail against it.
And he did indeed drive some of the most accommodating members among his flock of 750,000 into hiding, banning lay people from addressing the faithful during Mass, calling out priests who welcomed openly gay worshippers as abetting “a grave evil,” and quickly shutting down services like the one at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, in Minneapolis, where women often led the liturgy — without so much as a hello.
“You’re a controversial figure,” a woman told him back in 2008, at a St. Paul gathering of the National Council of Catholic Women. “I am?” he joked. “I tend to be straightforward — perhaps that puts people off.”
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