MINNESOTA
ABC News
MINNEAPOLIS October 12, 2013 (AP)
By AMY FORLITI and RACHEL ZOLL Associated Press
Attorneys for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis were seeking to put out a fire, not start a new one, when they asked a judge this month to keep private a list of Roman Catholic clergy believed to have molested children.
The court proceeding produced no definitive ruling on whether that document would be released, as victims are seeking, but it did reveal new details that intensified the crisis.
A judge entered into the public record a police report church attorneys had cited about a priest’s cache of porn kept in church archives for eight years, unleashing a cascade of new revelations about how the archdiocese responded when confronted with allegations of sexual misconduct.
In the days leading up to the Oct. 3 hearing, church officials already were fending off a canon lawyer who quit the archdiocese and was now accusing administrators of ignoring warnings in the last several years about at least two priests.
But with the latest disclosure, local police are investigating, prosecutors are getting involved, the top aide to Archbishop John Nienstedt has resigned from his leadership post, and the actions of a longtime high-ranking church administrator and a former archbishop are being called into question. Nienstedt set up a committee to conduct a review he hopes will restore trust that the archdiocese is following the U.S. bishops’ 2002 toughened policy on abuse.
“I think what it shows is how structural the problem is — that the problem does really go beyond something that is easily fixed simply by resolutions and handling things in a different way,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, who has advised church officials in Boston and elsewhere on stopping clergy abuse.
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.