MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
By JOE SOUCHERAY | jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com
PUBLISHED: July 21, 2016
The story inside the story, apparently, was that John Nienstedt, who lived in the house across Summit Avenue from the Cathedral, was himself the subject of an investigation into alleged sexual improprieties. And that furthermore, the Vatican’s guy in Washington, D.C. — the temptation is to write this in the style of Mario Puzo — tried to stuff the investigation.
As the Pioneer Press reported Thursday based on newly available records, the guy in Washington, Apostolic Nuncio Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican’s ambassador, allegedly told Lee Piche and Andrew Cozzens to back off and shut down the investigation into Nienstedt. Piche was then an auxiliary bishop. Cozzens was an auxiliary bishop. Daniel Griffith, the pastor at Our Lady of Lourdes in Minneapolis, worked with Cozzens and Piche as the liaison between the church and the law firm Greene Espel.
Greene Espel had been hired in January 2014 to investigate claims that Nienstedt had made inappropriate sexual advances over the years on a number of priests, seminary students and other men and that he allegedly sometimes interfered with the careers of the men who turned him down.
Judas Priest, as a guy I knew used to say. In other words, while the archdiocesan boat was taking on water and starting to list with the allegations of those sexual corruptions of children by priests, Nienstedt himself was also being investigated and even signed off on the investigation.
It sounds like Griffith told the law firm: “You are going to have free rein. We want to get to the bottom of this.’’
Four months into the investigation, preliminary findings included 10 sworn affidavits detailing behavior by Nienstedt that sounded simply tawdry but would have an added layer of seriousness if he was, in fact, using his power to influence careers. There was also evidence that Nienstedt had a close relationship with Curtis Wehmeyer, a former priest, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to sexually abusing three boys. Nienstedt and Wehmeyer were quite the social couple, apparently. Nienstedt even made Wehmeyer a pastor against the advice of people who apparently knew better than to put that character in charge of anything, much less a parish.
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