UNITED STATES
The Week
By Damon Linker
Have you heard the news about Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis? It seems he’s been accused of conducting numerous sexual affairs with men while also leading his archdiocese’s fight against same-sex marriage and regularly denouncing homosexuality in the most uncompromising terms possible. Nienstedt and his predecessor, Archbishop Harry Flynn, have also been credibly accused of covering up and showing indifference toward the sexual abuse of children by priests in the archdiocese.
I heard about both charges from blog posts by Rod Dreher, a conservative Christian friend, who learned of the first scandal from an article on the website of Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, and was tipped off about the second one by a loyal reader who sent Dreher (in PDF form) the text of a sworn affidavit by Jennifer Haselberger, the former chief canon lawyer for the archdiocese, who gave her damning testimony in a civil lawsuit. The day after Dreher’s post on the testimony appeared, The New York Times ran a substantial story about both scandals and the rising calls for Nienstedt’s resignation.
So let’s just say that if you hadn’t heard the news before you started reading this column, you would have heard about it elsewhere before long.
And that is a big problem for the churches, especially the conservative churches that seek to uphold and promulgate traditionalist views of morality and doctrine. Indeed, it’s a far bigger and potentially more ruinous problem than the one posed by dogmatic liberals using government regulations to impinge on the freedom of certain believers to practice and live their faith.
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