MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
By RUBÉN ROSARIO | rrosario@pioneerpress.com
PUBLISHED: July 3, 2016
I invited him to meet face-to-face over coffee at some point. He preferred green tea. Then, in a recent chat over the phone, Mike Tegeder apologized.
“I am feeling really tired right now,” he told me. “Let’s make it another time.” We agreed on a raincheck.
On June 24, several days after the call, the 67-year-old Minneapolis native and longtime Catholic priest and church pastor learned from his oncologist that further chemotherapy and immunotherapy infusion treatments to curb his aggressive cancer would be fruitless. Tegeder decided then to discontinue treatment and live his final days in hospice care.
The name Tegeder may be familiar to the state’s 1.2 million Catholics, as well as others. He was the priest — the only priest — who publicly, like me, called for Archbishop John Nienstedt’s resignation, well before it happened, for his mishandling of the clergy sexual-abuse scandal and Nienstedt’s expensive but unsuccessful lobbying effort to support a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex civil marriages.
Tegeder said openly what a handful of priests and others in the church who called me in recent years also felt but who implored me not to identify them for fear of retribution.
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