MINNESOTA
The American Conservative
[with video]
By ROD DREHER • June 10, 2014
In the clip above from a recent videotaped deposition, released today, Robert Carlson, the Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Louis, claims that he didn’t always know it was a crime for adults, including priests, to have sex with children. He testifies that he’s not sure when he learned that it was illegal. He testifies that he’s not even sure he knew as far back as the 1970s that sex with children was illegal.
If this testimony is accurate, Archbishop Carlson is a moral idiot who lacked the sense to run a Boy Scout troop, much less a Catholic parish or diocese. But there is good news for the archbishop: documents released yesterday indicate that he may simply be a butt-covering coward perjurer:
Anderson went on to ask Carlson whether he knew in 1984, when he was an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, that it was crime for a priest to engage in sex with a child.
“I’m not sure if I did or didn’t,” Carlson said.
Yet according to documents released Monday by the law firm Jeff Anderson & Associates in St. Paul, Carlson showed clear knowledge that sexual abuse was a crime when discussing incidents with church officials during his time in Minnesota.
In a 1984 document, for example, Carlson wrote to the then archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, John R. Roach, about one victim of sexual abuse and mentioned that the statute of limitations for filing a claim would not expire for more than two years. He also wrote that the parents of the victim were considering reporting the incident to the police.
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