MINNESOTA
MinnPost
By Brian Lambert
Not yet, anyway. MPR says: “Ramsey County Attorney John Choi reaffirmed his determination Wednesday not to convene a grand jury while police are still investigating allegations of child abuse in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. ‘I have to make some tough calls, and I believe in a certain way to get to a conclusion,’ he said on The Daily Circuit. ‘An investigative grand jury at this moment, when there’s an active police investigation going on, would be really inappropriate and an abuse of my power. Let’s let the police investigation come to some completion, and then they can present information to us, and we can make appropriate decisions based upon that.’ ”
An editorial in the Marshall Independent goes fairly easy on the archbishop: “We credit Archbishop John Nienstedt for his frankness when commenting publically Sunday on the allegations of sexual abuse by priests in Minnesota, but we’re not surprised if what he said fell on a lot of deaf ears across the state. … Nienstedt didn’t make excuses, apologized for overlooking the issue and admitted he should have investigated it ‘a lot more than I did.’ We respect his candor and willingness to take responsibility, but that won’t wipe his slate clean. And saying he was ‘surprised as anyone else,’ surely didn’t help his cause, or the church’s. In a position of such great leadership, Nienstedt should’ve done his due diligence, regardless of what he was told. Had he, perhaps those blinders wouldn’t have been put on and he wouldn’t have been so ‘surprised.’ This issue is just too damaging, too sensitive and personal, for him to have assumed anything.”
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