MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio
[Affidavit of Thomas E. Ring – Redacted
July 7, 2014 Memo]
Laura Yuen, Peter Cox
St. Paul · Jul 21, 2016
Documents released by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office Wednesday showed the extraordinary measures Catholic officials took to quash a private investigation into former Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt.
Nienstedt himself had ordered the investigation, citing unspecified allegations against himself. He said at the time that the allegations did not “involve minors or lay members of the faithful, and they do not implicate any kind of illegal or criminal behavior” and “involve events alleged to have occurred at least a decade ago, before I began serving in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.”
He called those unspecified claims, at the time, “absolutely and entirely false.”
But as MPR News previously reported, once the lawyers hired to conduct the investigation started uncovering allegations of Nienstedt’s alleged sexual misconduct with adult men, the archbishop attempted to obstruct their work.
One new document, released Wednesday, goes even further: It suggests that the order to halt the investigation came not from Nienstedt, but straight from the Vatican.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.