KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
January 15, 2019
By Hank Shea
The Catholic Church is in serious and deepening crisis, primarily as a result of grave sins and failed leadership involving clergy sexual misconduct. This tragedy is most recently exemplified by the alleged abusive, long-standing behavior of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In order for the church in the United States to determine and learn from how it failed to address McCarrick’s decades of alleged misconduct, new guidelines and procedures must be established and implemented for investigating him and any high-ranking church leader.
For the last five years, the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese has grappled with this challenge, having had to investigate its former Archbishop John Nienstedt for alleged personal sexual misconduct and failed leadership involving abuse by other clergy.
Many painful lessons were learned from that investigation, which was prematurely terminated and never resumed. Egregious clergy abuse by an archdiocesan priest and the failed leadership that permitted that abuse to occur ultimately led to criminal charges being filed against the archdiocese and Nienstedt’s abrupt resignation. Those lessons should be examined and heeded by every American cardinal, archbishop and bishop to avoid their repetition elsewhere.
I write as a lifelong, faithful Catholic who was raised by devout parents and educated in parochial schools for 12 years and benefited from a Jesuit college education; I also raised four children in the Catholic faith. For 20 years, I served as a federal prosecutor in Minnesota, specializing in white collar crime, and supervising hundreds of investigations of alleged misconduct, abuse of power, and/or concealment of wrongdoing by business leaders, government officials, lawyers and other professionals. For the past 10 years, I have taught at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, starting with ethical leadership courses and more recently, teaching courses on how to conduct investigations.
Based on my many years of supervising and teaching how to do complex investigations, and having closely followed the investigation of Nienstedt and conduct related to it, I have identified 10 of the most important lessons to be learned from the initial success and then ultimate failures surrounding that investigation.
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