MINNESOTA
Star Tribune
Warren Wolfe, Star Tribune
March 4, 2005
Since late 2003, 18 people have told the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis that they were sexually abused as children by priests, nuns and other Catholic church workers, officials said Thursday.
Ten of those cases involved priests from the archdiocese who no longer are in active ministry. The most recent case stems from 1980.
The others were filed by local people against priests, nuns or monks from elsewhere in the country, said Dennis McGrath, a spokesman for the Twin Cities archdiocese.
"The good news, if you can call it that, is that only one of the 10 was a new name, a priest who died 34 years ago," he said. "The others had been previously identified publicly" as alleged perpetrators. He said he did not have permission to name the 10.
It was the archdiocese's second accounting of sexual abuse. Such accounting is required of each of the nation's 195 dioceses under a policy adopted three years ago by American bishops in response to a nationwide sex abuse scandal in the church.
One of the newest suits was filed Wednesday in Hennepin County District Court. A man in his 30s claims that he was abused 20 years ago by a Dominican monk, now dead, who was his religion and sex education teacher at a Minneapolis Catholic school. The archdiocese is not a defendant.
Posted by kshaw at March 4, 2005 05:46 AM