MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
By Ruben Rosario
POSTED: 10/13/2013
In the words of the immortal Jimmy Cannon, nobody asked me, but …
I leave town for a while and all heck breaks loose in the Twin Cities. A 9-year-old Minneapolis boy evades airport security and winds up on a flight to Sin City. Speaking of sin, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is once again in hot water and CYA mode over its mishandling of two clergy sexual misconduct cases. …
MEA CULPA, MEA CULPA
I also don’t know where to begin with this latest scandal involving my church. This stuff has been dominating headlines for decades. If not for courageous victims and lawyers such as St. Paul’s Jeff Anderson, we would still have church officials transferring child predators from one parish to another and paying off victims, accountable to no one but themselves.
Numerous panels have been formed at the local and national levels to come up with policies and other steps to curb the sexual abuse of children and related misconduct by members of the clergy.
So it saddens me again to read that in one case, top archdiocese officials never contacted police and hid pornographic images found on a priest’s laptop computer for nearly a decade. In a letter written but never sent to the Vatican, Archbishop John Nienstedt wrote about pornography that contained images and was “borderline illegal due to the apparent age of those photographed.”
But instead of lamenting the plight of those boys and others in the images, Nienstedt instead expressed concern that “the images in the (priest’s) personnel file could expose the Archdiocese, as well as myself, to criminal prosecution.”
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