New Details from Man Who Claims Church Covered up Sexual Abuse

Valley News Live
September 22, 2017

http://www.valleynewslive.com/content/news/New-details-from-man-who-claims-church-covered-up-sexual-abuse-446594783.html

New information from the man who claims a priest molested him and then the church tried to cover it up.

He's suing the Crookston Dioceses for trying to cover-up the abuse and is worried there could be more victims still out there.

"Right now we're going to be building a cabinet for a gal."

Ron Vasek is the 'Spare Husband.'

"Kind of anything that somebody needs done."

The family-man handyman runs this business with his son.

"My family is the most important thing that I have on this earth."

He says the Catholic Church used another one of his sons to keep sexual abuse quiet.

"And it'd be very difficult for your son, who's a priest at our diocese too," Vasek said that's what he was told by the Crookston Diocese if he didn't sign a letter discrediting any sexual abuse.

"He molested me and I kind of fended him off."

Vasek says when he was 16-years-old on a church trip Father Grundhaus molested him in a hotel room. He says he carried that secret for more than four decades. He says it as even Father Grundhaus that married him and wife, even baptized his kids.

"When my kids were little, I could never change their diapers. I always felt that if I touched their genitals that I might enjoy it, or that I was abusing them. So My whole relationship with my children has been effected by that."

Now, Vasek says his goal is to cleanse the dioceses of men like Bishop Michael Hoeppner.

"There's God and then there's the church. And I'm the church. I'm the one that does the ordaining. I'm the one that decides who gets ordained."

Vasek says that's what Bishop Hoeppner told him and his wife during a meeting when he was trying to get ordained as a deacon. He says it was then he decided to sue the diocese.

"Everything that I had learned about sexual predators is that there is never just one victim."

He wants to expose what's going on inside the Crookston Diocese and wants to encourage other victims to come forward.

"That's the part that's sickening. Is the cover-ups and the hiding behind the rules and hiding behind this and that."

Now, the future of the lawsuit is up to judge in Pennington County. But, Vasek says this case will ultimately be decided by different judge.

The Crookston Diocese denies Vasek's allegations. They released a statement yesterday saying they take all matters of sexual misconduct seriously and that Father Grundhaus remains suspended from public ministry.

The full Crookston Diocese statement is attached.

Vasek says if you, or you know someone that has been abused you can reach him through his lawyers at Jeff Anderson and Associates.