Vatican Must Link Removal of Minnesota Bishops to Pedophilia Scandal

By Rudolph Bush
Dallas Morning News
June 16, 2015

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2015/06/vatican-must-link-removal-of-minnesota-bishops-to-sex-scandal.html/

Archbishop John Nienstedt talks with a reporter at his office in St. Paul, Minn. in 2014. The archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, and a deputy bishop have resigned after prosecutors there charged the archdiocese with having failed to protect children from unspeakable harm from a pedophile priest. (AP Photo/Craig Lassig, File)

Only a week has passed since Pope Francis declared a new tribunal to review cases of bishops who shielded pedophile priests and shuffled them around parishes to protect them from discovery.

And just two weeks have passed since prosecutors in St. Paul, Minn. accused the Catholic Archdiocese there of “willfully ignoring signs of a pedophile priest,” according to a story in the New York Times.

In a signal that the Vatican is at last catching up to the concerns of the faithful, both Archbishop John Nienstedt and Lee Piche, an auxiliary bishop, resigned in St. Paul yesterday.

Nienstedt suggested the decision was his own. The facts, and his longtime reticence to resign, suggest otherwise.

“In order to give the Archdiocese a new beginning amidst the many challenges we face, I have submitted my resignation as Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis to our Holy Father, Pope Francis, and I have just received word that he has accepted it,” Nienstedt wrote.

He added that he leaves the church with a clear conscience.

It will be up to prosecutors to show whether that clear conscience is warranted.

The Vatican, meanwhile, should clarify the circumstances of Nienstedt’s resignation. Was he pressured by the cardinals, or even by the pope, to step down or was this, in fact, a personal decision? That’s important. It means there is at least a degree of accountability.

The idea that Nienstedt and Piche would resign at the same time calls into question that this was a decision they made separate and apart from the church hierarchy.

It’s critical that members of the diocese and members of the wider church understand whether the Vatican saw fit to punish these men for failing to protect children from predators.

The pedophilia scandal isn’t over in the Catholic Church, as much as many would like it to be.

Pope Francis acknowledged as much when he set up the tribunal. Now, it’s time for a degree of transparency that will help restore confidence in the church.

That begins with helping us understand these resignations. But it certainly doesn’t end there.

Nienstedt had resolutely refused to resign despite coming under fire like few bishops in America. He faced criticism within his own office.

“His own former chancellor for canonical affairs, Jennifer M. Haselberger, who charged that the church used a chaotic system of record keeping that helped conceal the backgrounds of guilty priests who remained on assignment,” the Times reports.

His claim that he wasn’t closely involved in monitoring priests smacks of the explanations of former Dallas Bishop Charles Grahmann, who testified he had never read the personnel file of the pedophile priest Rudy Kos.

The culture of the church has to change to ensure that no one overlooks the possibility of abuse.

This is a beginning, and a good one. But it is only a beginning.