MINNESOTA
Pioneer Press
rosario@pioneerpress.com
POSTED: 10/13/2014
The unprecedented public reconciliation was held Monday afternoon in the most appropriately named building in the Saintly City.
Indeed. The joint announcement of a financial settlement and a child-safety plan hammered out by Roman Catholic archdiocese officials and a noted lawyer who has waged, at least litigiously, a holy war on behalf of child clergy-abuse victims for over three decades, was held at the Landmark Center. The number of the room where the historic gathering was held was also symbolic — 317.
Look up Luke 3:17 and this is what it says: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Essentially, Jesus will hold folks accountable and ultimately keep the good and do away with the bad.
Room 317 turned into a mass confessional box on Monday afternoon. All that was needed were the exterior green and red lights to determine whether the room was occupied or empty to receive another sinner’s atonement.
But occupied this afternoon it was, except that the roles were reversed. This time, it was the church expressing the mea culpa to the aggrieved congregants.
More than 100 people — including more than 20 male abuse survivors — came not only to hear details about a court-approved resolution to a pending lawsuit, but to witness something they have never seen before — St.
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