MINNESOTA
Star Tribune
Article by: JEAN HOPFENSPERGER , Star Tribune Updated: July 15, 2014
Jennifer Haselberger, who resigned as canon lawyer at the Twin Cities Archdiocese, describes flawed clergy abuse policies in written testimony.
Jennifer Haselberger, the whistleblower who exposed troubling clergy child abuse practices in the Twin Cities archdiocese, offers further details of the church’s protection of abusing priests in an affidavit filed in Ramsey County District Court Tuesday morning.
Hasselberger described the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis as a place where child abusers were given repeated opportunities to remain in the priesthood, where “monitoring” was lax or nonexistent, and where investigations into abuse complaints often missed key interviews and resulted in findings that favored priests.
Financial deals were frequently cut with priests who agreed to step down from ministry, she said. Some, however, tried to come back — even after serving jail time.
The archdiocese, she wrote, had a “cavalier attitude toward the safety of other people’s children.”
The written testimony of Hasselberger, an archdiocese canon lawyer before resigning last year, comes in response to an explosive lawsuit filed on behalf of a man who claims former priest Tom Adamson abused him in the 1970s.
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