MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
By Emily Gurnon
egurnon@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 08/11/2014
The Rev. Kenneth LaVan began sexually abusing girls with his first parish assignment in the 1960s, and later threatened to burn down a woman’s house and have her husband killed — yet he was not removed from active ministry in the Twin Cities until last year, according to court and internal church records.
The Rev. Kevin McDonough told then-Archbishop Harry Flynn in 2005 that, while he knew of LaVan’s “boundary violations with adult females, I had forgotten that there were two allegations in the late 1980s concerning sexual involvement with teenaged girls.”
There were “significant doubts” about the girls’ stories, however, McDonough told Flynn. Nevertheless, he raised the possibility of “reopening an investigation into these old matters.
The details about LaVan’s record at parishes in West St. Paul, Crystal, Lake St. Croix Beach and Lino Lakes, among other locations, were revealed through a court-ordered release of his internal church file. Attorney Jeffrey Anderson, who sued the archdiocese on behalf of a man alleging sexual abuse by a different priest, released the contents of the file Monday to reporters.
“The secret personnel file of Kenneth LaVan shows a pernicious ‘blind spot’ among Catholic officials at the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis: the stunning and heartless minimization of the sexual abuse of girls and women,” Anderson said in a written statement.
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