MINNESOTA
City Pages
By Jesse Marx Wednesday, Mar 19 2014
Patrick Wall flips through a six-inch-thick binder in a law office that once housed a confessional booth. He’s got whole boxes yet to comb through, each containing several decades’ worth of internal church memos, affidavits, and police reports.
Every whiff of possible corruption gets filed somewhere inside his graying, bushy dome, which seems mounted on his barrel chest sans neck. He has a face like a bulldog and the cadence of a detective; in another life he might have made it to the NFL.
But today he has a more sundry task: researching clerical sexual abuse cases and relaying the findings to the St. Paul attorneys who employ him.
Wall won’t be present when Archbishop John Nienstedt and former Vicar General Kevin McDonough are deposed in a few weeks, but his stamp will be all over the inquisition. It’s for the best, because Wall’s presence may rub the holy men the wrong way. He’s no longer welcome at the archdiocese, and for good reason.
“I am the enemy,” Wall says, smiling. “I am the ultimate defector.”
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