Congrats!
After a couple of years of diligent reporting about the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s coverup of priests’ involvement in sexual abuse of minors (especially by MPR), you have convinced the Vatican to completely toss the Archdioce’s leadership.
Bully.
Now, when the scent of that glorious celebration (at the Amsterdam? WA Frost? The Lex?) has faded from your journalistic nostrils, we’ve got a couple more stories for you to cover.
Bill Clinton, beloved of our cultural elites (including most of you in the media, whom he treated like the old pals you longed to be), has been linked at the hip with an industrial-grade pedophile.
And the AP found that 2,500 teachers have have been punished for one degree of sexual abuse of students or another in the past five years. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve not heard of any time at which 500 priests per year were being rung up on sexual abuse charges. Have you?
You’ve spent the past couple years investigating the tolerance of tolerance of sexual abuse in high places within a major institution. Well, we’ve got another major institution for you to look into, and involvement in still more in some very high places to dig into.
Never let it be said I’m not here to help.
The Archbishop is a real Catholic with real Catholic values. That makes him the enemy of the intolerant Twin Cities leftist establishment. He needed to be destroyed.
There have been 10’s of thousands of words written and spoken by Twin Cities media on this over the past 24 hours. Not once was “homosexual priests” mentioned. Perhaps MSM feels the abusers represent a “broad strata” of society.
Nienstedt didn’t understand what he was up against. The next Archbishop will be more politically savvy.
I made the chance to look up what is linked to child sexual abuse, and the clearest thing I can see is that it’s linked to a lack of intact families. Now if I wanted to make liberals squirm, I would really enjoy asking them why they support welfare policies that result in more sexual abuse of children.
And if I really wanted to make Mrs. Clinton squirm, I’d also ask her why she stayed with Bill despite clear evidence of not only his infidelity, but also cavorting with prostitutes. OK, you’re against sexual exploitation of women, why are you still with Bill?
Not quite sure what to make of Nienstedt. It is possible that he’s just the politically naive victim of the liberal Gestapo, but the article suggests that there may be information out there that explains why he didn’t do very well investigating this. The Holy See can clear this up, at least in part, by releasing the Green Espel investigation results, no?
To his credit, Clinton seems to have broken off his relationship with Epstein when Epstein began to attract legal attention in 2006. Clinton ain’t stupid.
I wonder what the heck is going with the Epstein story.
The guy is a middle and high school teacher at the toney Dalton school in NY (Matt Yglesias went to Dalton). Out of nowhere Epstein gets a job at a financial house. At the financial house he makes partner, then he gets a golden payday and “retires”. Epstein then gets caught running a stable of underage hookers for influential people. With cameras everywhere, so he has photographic evidence of who did what.
I don’t have a degree in journalism, but I can connect the dots.
A non-Catholic, married to a Catholic here. If the Archbishop participated in concealing the abuse of children, and protecting the perpetrator, I can think there will be little redemption for him in the afterlife, a little in this life, either.
You used to hear that the church should allow priests to marry to prevent this, but that ran counter to the fact that most of the children abused were male. Now days, looks like it is a double win.
PM, I can’t give credit to Clinton for cutting off contact with Epstein after Epstein was caught. The reason is simple; he had an entire Secret Service staff there to take care of his security, and as such it is improbable that he didn’t notice or wasn’t told what was going on. His being photographed with known hookers indicates he doesn’t really care until it endangers his business model.
My understanding of the situation is that Nienstedt is answering for not landing on (now convicted and incarcerated) pedophile priest Curtis Wehmeyer with both boots – even after all the now revealed scandals of the last two decades. As my parish priest noted at the time of the Wehmeyer revelations, the people at the archdiocese (not including Nienstedt) involved in this ignoring of abuse/covering up were his (my parish priests) friends and colleagues for decades. He (my parish priest) told us he was deeply disillusioned at the Archdiocese’s actions. A number of Catholics (I have heard) were holding back donations/offerings both to their local parish as well as to the Archdiocese until Nienstedt moved on.
Think if you could hold back your school district taxes when they had an abuse situation. Especially if you consider what EdMin and the various school boards in the area are doing on minority graduation rates to be abuse.
Twin Cities Catholic, breaks my heart to see the Church in trouble largely of its own making. I’m privy to no insider information, but I wonder how much of the problem was caused by running the corporation as a church instead of a business.
Christians are in the forgiving business. Sombody sins, they repent, we forgive them. That’s what we’re supposed to do as ordinary believers; how much moreso the members of the clergy.
Except . . . you’re not just running a forgiveness factory, you’re operating a juridical entity, a legal fiction that exists to shelter assets, created under the laws of the state and subject to the regulations of the government.
One of those regulations is a duty to supervise subordinates who are acting as agents of your entity, so they don’t do harm to others. And when they do, a few Hail Marys and reassignment to Podunk might be okay to satisfy God’s law, but it’s not enough to satisfy Minnesota law. That’s going to require suspension or termination plus restitution, same as if you were Wal-Mart or any other large employer.
Breaks my heart.
Joe, sure, the church is in the forgiving business, but we’ve also got provisions for church discipline (Matthew 18, 1 Cor. 5) and qualifications for ministry (1 Tim. 3.) So I’d argue that the Catholic leadership in the city got caught not just not treating it as a business, but also not treating it as a church. And you’ll find Christians of all stripes caught guilty of closing ranks around abusers, sad to say.
Just like, for what it’s worth, we and our gracious host would accuse the media of doing for politicians on the left and those who support them. No?
One note on the scandal with teachers; having grown up next door to boys that were molested by a teacher (who was the husband of my 5th grade teacher), and having seen some of the stats on this, I’m guessing the real numbers are much uglier. And that may, or may not, have anything to do with anything the NEA and AFT are doing.
Not sure what’s causing the leftist media to shy away fro teacher abuse.
80% of priestly abuse is attributable to homo men predating on young, post pubescent boys. But the chance to bash the one last bastion of moral decency is worth the risk for them. They just deny the facts.
Do you think there are more homo men teaching than playing priest?
Very sad time for those of us who’ve answered “to whom shall we go Lord” in the Catholic Church. Still trying to figure out why Jennifer Haselberger developed such an intense and apparently personal animus toward the Archbishop. http://canonicalconsultation.com/1/post/2015/06/the-line-in-the-sand.html
How one can anyone defend the indefensible.
I see you’ve been eating Chinese food again, Emery, you’re back to quoting fortune cookies. How were the egg rolls?
Doakes for the win!
Priests raping young boys while a Catholic administration enables it. I don’t see any winners here Tom.
Funny you say that Emery, given that your scheming, soulless ilk are busy trying to put the same exact problem in the laps of the Boy Scouts.
Please wipe the chair off when you leave.
At least you’re not attempting to blame “Media” for the buggery and the Archdiocese malfeasance. I’ll give you that…
Blame them for the crime? Nope.
Blame them for selective outrage? Absolutely. That’s what the post is about.
Tweety: Paedophilia practiced by Catholic priests on the children placed in their care does not occur statistically any more or less than in other youth groups. Although one would expect much better of a group that actively seeks to be ‘holier than thou’, it merely reveals their feet of clay. They are no different than boy scout leaders, other Christian ministers, and other leaders of children’s groups in the reported instances of child abuse.
A lot of bad things have been done in the name of Christianity and its various churches. Far more good things are done, throughout history and in every parish today and every day. I’ve never known an atheist group to inspire their members to do anything but bad-mouth organized religion. Given what I’ve seen of atheists and Christians, I’d rather live in a community of Christians any day.
MBerg: I had read here recently that you were reluctant to link to Daily mail “news stories”? You mentioned something about credibility…….