MINNESOTA
KSTP
Updated: 03/03/2005 08:14:22 AM
A 5 Eyewitness News investigation reveals secrets at the highest level of the Catholic Church. We obtained a 1962 Vatican document that directs church leaders how to handle sex abuse cases. It indicates the secrecy surrounding these cases started at the top. We found the secrecy often stays too long with the victim.
Rodney Jenniges is forty seven years old. He told us, "You don't heal a hundred percent is the whole problem." He says he kept his abuse secret for twenty years. Now he's trying to rebuild his life by tearing down the past that haunts him. "I think back now and I just cringe." Jenniges says unspeakable things happened inside the rectory at St. Albert the Great in Minneapolis.
He says he was only 12 when Brother Edmund Frost gave him alcohol before molesting him and maintains many people knew what was going on at the rectory. He told us, "I would just like an apology."
Brother Frost is now dead, but Jenniges says he would still like an apology from the church. He didn't get one when he filed a lawsuit in 1999. Instead the church fought him and the courts determined the statute of limitations had run out.
But it may not be too late for John Doe 56 who filed his lawsuit Wednesday. He was an altar boy at St. Albert's in the early 1970's and went to the parish school where Brother Frost taught sex education. John Doe 56 wants to remain anonymous. He says he hasn't even told his parents about the abuse. He says it started when Frost showed him a deck of pornographic playing cards and described each sex act on the cards. Afterward he performed oral sex on him. In all he says Brother Frost sodomized him 10 times. The now grown man, told us how that abuse has affected his life. He said, "It's a lonely, lonely feeling and very depressing." He also told us why he's filing the lawsuit. "I want them held accountable."