MINNESOTA
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • October 14, 2013
A Catholic reader sent me this tremendous post from Commonweal’s Grant Gallicho, taking stock of the sex abuse/child porn mess in the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, which was broken by the reporting of Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). If you haven’t been following the story, Gallicho’s post will bring you up to speed. Gallicho talks in detail about how the previous Archbishop, Harry Flynn, covered up the discovery of a priest’s porn that might involve minors even though he was at the time the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ point man for fixing the abuse scandal. His successor, Abp Nienstedt, was scarcely better. Now Nienstedt has appointed a priest to come up with an “independent lay task force” to investigate what happened and how it could be avoided in the future.
What butt-covering nonsense. Do they really need another panel to find out what the problem is? It’s not the process; it’s the people who run the diocese (and not just the bureaucrats). Gallicho says it well:
[P]erhaps it would be a good idea to stop pretending that these failures had anything to do with policy, and admit that they were entirely the fault of a culture that prized self-protection and secrecy above disclosure and, yes, justice. Is it appalling when an archbishop acknowledges to ecclesiastical authorities that one of his priests is in possession of “borderline illegal” images of children but can’t work up the will to share this information with the civil authorities? Yes. Just as it’s troubling that a bishop who had long won the praise of inaugural members of the USCCB National Review Board apparently promoted a priest who had no business anywhere near children, and then seemingly failed to report a priest who may have downloaded child porn–just two years after he voted to approve the very rules the bishops adopted to address the scandal. But should you be surprised that bishops who fail so miserably have underlings who have trouble reading the reddest of flags?
Of course, it’s not only clerics who help sustain this culture of denial. The maintenance man for the Wehmeyer’s parish told the police that for two years he noticed the same boys going to and from the priest’s camper. “We told [the parish’s business administrator], and she should have done something about it.” Why didn’t he?
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