MINNESOTA
National Catholic Reporter
Joe Winter | Oct. 4, 2013
ST. PAUL, MINN. The archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has been accused of withholding from police images of child pornography that were on a priest’s laptop, deciding instead to place the evidence in a church-owned vault.
The second-in-charge at the archdiocese, Fr. Peter Laird, who was its vicar general and moderator of the Curia, resigned Thursday after the information from a St. Paul police report was released in court during a separate matter involving child-sex charges. According to the report, Laird appears to have had a role in keeping the information suppressed.
About 2,300 images have been found, according to the report. A forensics expert hired by the archdiocese said he “was instructed to view only some of the (computer’s) contents,” the police report adds.
The laptop, owned by Fr. Jonathan Shelley, was later sold at a rummage sale, and the new owner discovered the images and alerted the archdiocese in about 2003, the police report says. The images were soon secured in the vault, the report states.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.