Avoiding Corporate Responsibility – Page 139

June 20, 2015

Report: Former Twin Cities archbishop John Nienstedt tried to limit investigation

The former archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, John Nienstedt, interfered with an investigation by an outside law firm into allegations of his misconduct, Minnesota Public Radio reported Friday.

While Nienstedt authorized the investigation in the hope of clearing his name, the results threatened to ruin it. Several of his top advisers gathered privately in April 2014, and read sworn statements gathered by the lawyers that accused Nienstedt of inappropriate behavior, including sexual advances toward priests. Each adviser agreed he should resign.

A few days later, Auxiliary Bishops Lee Piche and Andrew Cozzens traveled to Washington to tell the papal ambassador; MPR was unable to learn what transpired there. But soon after the bishops returned home, the investigation as originally conceived ended, with Piche limiting the probe to allegations of crimes and grave sins. A new law firm eventually took over.

The Vatican announced Nienstedt’s and Piche’s resignationsMonday. They stepped down amid an intensifying scandal over how the archdiocese handled cases of clerical sexual misconduct. The archdiocese sought bankruptcy protection in January as abuse claims rose, and prosecutors filed criminal child-endangerment charges against the archdiocese earlier this month for allegedly turning a blind eye to Curtis Wehmeyer, a now-imprisoned former priest convicted of molesting two boys.

MPR said its details of how Nienstedt tried to limit the investigation came from interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the inquiry, including four people who provided affidavits to investigators, current and former archdiocese officials, and others who spoke with the investigators.

MPR could not reach Nienstedt for comment on the new allegations. In a 2014 interview, Nienstedt said, “I’ve done nothing criminally wrong ever, and nothing immoral” and that he hadn’t interfered with the investigation.

But attorneys at the Greene Espel law firm — the initial firm on the Nienstedt investigation — disputed the archbishop’s claim of noninterference as well as a recent similar statement from Piche.

“We strongly disagree with those statements. Greene Espel’s investigation and work will not be mischaracterized without a response by us,” attorneys Matt Forsgren and David Wallace-Jackson told MPR.

The attorneys had wanted to know whether Nienstedt had a personal relationship with Wehmeyer, and whether that influenced his decision to keep Wehmeyer in ministry despite knowing about his past misconduct. Nienstedt told MPR in 2014 he did not have a sexually inappropriate relationship with Wehmeyer.

Wehmeyer told the investigators he couldn’t understand why Nienstedt wanted to spend time with him or why he kept him in ministry. He said Nienstedt made him uncomfortable and that he wasn’t interested in Nienstedt.

Ex-seminarian James Heathcott, who lives in Oregon, told MPR he enrolled at a Detroit seminary in 1987 when he was 18. Nienstedt became rector a year later, and the seminary’s tone immediately changed, he said.

According to the affidavit, Nienstedt asked Heathcott: “Have you explored your sexuality?” and “Do you think you have homosexual tendencies?”

Heathcott also said Nienstedt later invited him on a ski trip at a “private chalet.” Heathcott said he declined and told Nienstedt that the invitation appeared to contradict his own statements to seminarians about the importance of boundaries. He said Nienstedt told him a few days later to pack his belongings and leave.

“I consider Nienstedt’s interactions with me to be a kind of grooming … I believe he denied me the chance to continue exploring my calling to the priesthood to its fruition,” he said in the affidavit.

The archdiocese, which filed for bankruptcy in January, hasn’t said what it paid Greene Espel. MPR, citing people with direct knowledge, put the cost at several hundred thousand dollars. The firm wouldn’t comment either. The archdiocese paid the second firm, Wold Morrison, nearly $139,000 between October and January, but the filing didn’t say if it made any payments to either firm earlier.

Complete Article HERE!

June 16, 2015June 16, 2015

More smoke and mirrors from the Vatican on child sexual abuse

By Kieran Tapsell

Cardinal Desmond Connell, the former archbishop of Dublin, told the Murphy commission in Ireland that mental reservation was deceiving someone without telling a lie. He said it is permissible to use “an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be.”There is an exquisite piece of mental reservation in a recent announcement from the Vatican. According to Vatican Radio, “The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors presented a five point plan to the Pope and his closest advisors at this week’s meeting, including the establishment of a ‘new judicial section’ to examine all cases of bishops accused of abusing their office and failing to report crimes committed by priests in their care.”

The ambiguous expression in this case is “failing to report crimes” because it does not say to whom the bishops should have reported. Nearly everyone would understand the expression to mean reporting to the police. That is not what the Vatican means. It means reporting to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in every case and only sometimes to the police.

As the Holy See told the Irish foreign minister in 2011, bishops are the governors of their own diocese, and so far as the church is concerned, the only restraint on them is canon law. Bishops can only be put on trial before this new tribunal for breaching canon law. A bishop who fails to report credible allegations of child sexual abuse by clergy to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is in breach of canon law because that obligation is set out in the decree Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela.

Likewise, canon law in the United States since 2002, and for the rest of the world since 2010, requires bishops to comply with domestic civil reporting laws. A failure to do so constitutes a breach of canon law. The recently resigned bishops — Archbishop John Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché of St. Paul-Minneapolis and Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., who was convicted by a Missouri court of failing to report a priest’s possession of child pornography — could be brought before the new tribunal for failing to comply with civil laws on reporting as required by the norms approved in December 2002 by the Holy See for the United States.

Very few jurisdictions in the world have comprehensive reporting laws. Most have reporting laws for children at risk, that is, where they are under the age of 18, but very few have reporting laws that apply to historical abuse, that is, where the abused person is now an adult. In the United States, half the states have such laws and half do not. The United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Canada do not have them. In 2014 and 2015, the Italian and Polish Catholic bishops’ conferences announced that they would not be reporting child sex abuse offenses by clergy to the police because their civil laws did not require it. Their stance is consistent with canon law.

In Australia, only two out of the eight states and territories require the reporting of historical abuse. Figures produced at the Victorian parliamentary inquiry in Australia suggest that historical abuse amounts to more than 99 percent of all complaints. The same inquiry found that of the 611 complaints of child sexual abuse in the four Victorian dioceses between 1996 and 2012, not one of them had been reported by the church to the civil authorities.

This was understandable because prior to 2014, there was no requirement under Victorian law to report any abuse, whether of children at risk or historical abuse. And the bishops on ordination had sworn an oath to obey all ecclesiastical laws, which in this case meant not reporting these crimes to the police in accordance with the pontifical secret imposed by Pope Paul VI’s Secreta Continere and Pope John Paul II’s Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela.

In those jurisdictions without such reporting laws, unless a bishop walks into a priest’s bedroom and finds him in flagrante delicto with a minor, the pontifical secret prevents him from reporting any knowledge of or allegations about such crimes to the police. If he reports the matter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he has complied with canon law and cannot be charged with “abuse of office,” despite the fact that he has covered up these crimes by not reporting them to the police.

On two occasions now, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee against Torture demanded that the Holy See abolish the pontifical secret for child sexual abuse and order mandatory reporting under canon law, irrespective of whether there are civil reporting laws or not. On Sept. 26, 2014, the Holy See rejected the request.

Many media reports describe the setting up of this tribunal as a breakthrough. There is no breakthrough. The announcement does not do away with the pontifical secret and does not extend reporting requirements to the civil authorities. In many cases of cover-up by bishops, there will be no abuse of office because the cover-up has been required by canon law, as the announcements by the Italian and Polish bishops attest.

The pope has always had jurisdiction to dismiss or punish bishops like Nienstedt, Piché and Finn, who have breached canon law. He even has jurisdiction to dismiss them even where they have not breached canon law, as the case of the Australian Bishop William Morris shows.

This announcement is being dressed up as a measure to protect children when all it is doing is setting up a tribunal that would ensure that bishops accused of breaching canon law have the right to be heard. It is another example of clericalism creating smoke and mirrors to give the impression that better protections are being provided for children when the people being looked after are the bishops. The real breakthrough will happen when the Holy See complies with the demands of the United Nations.
Complete Article HERE!

June 5, 2015

Criminal Charges Filed Against Minnesota Catholic Archdiocese Over Mishandling of Sex Abuse Claims

by Hemant Mehta

Twin Cities (Minnesota) Archbishop John Nienstedt (below) spent years arguing against LGBT rights. In 2007, he wrote that “those who actively encourage or promote homosexual acts… formally cooperate in a grave evil and, if they do so knowingly and willingly, are guilty of mortal sin.” He condemned Brokeback Mountain when it came out. And he spent $650,000 of the Church’s money trying to convince Minnesota voters to pass an amendment banning same-sex marriage — an amendment that ultimately failed.

Cover it up, Archbishop… cover it up

It’s hardly surprisingly, then, that Nienstedt was under investigation for having sex with other priests. More importantly, he retaliated against anyone who didn’t respond in kind or questioned what he was doing. He denies all of these allegations, of course.

But there was another aspect to the story that was even more disturbing: One of the men promoted by Nienstedt to become a pastor, Curtis Wehmeyer, ended up molesting kids while in that role. If Nienstedt and his colleagues knew about it and didn’t put a stop to it, they deserve to be punished.

That’s why we’re seeing government officials come down on the Roman Catholic Archdiocese today:

Prosecutors in Minnesota filed criminal charges on Friday against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, accusing church leaders of mishandling repeated complaints of sexual abuse by a priest.

…

Though there have been several allegations of sexual abuse over the years by priests in the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Friday’s charges focus on the church’s handling of “numerous and repeated reports of troubling conduct” by Curtis Wehmeyer, who was dismissed as a priest in March.

Mr. Wehmeyer, 50, was sentenced in 2013 for criminal sexual conduct and possession of child pornography. He is in prison in Minnesota, and he has been charged with sex crimes in Wisconsin.

…

In a statement in March announcing Mr. Wehmeyer’s dismissal from the priesthood, Archbishop John C. Nienstedt expressed support for sex abuse victims.

“I am deeply saddened and have been profoundly affected by the stories I continue to hear from victims/survivors of clergy sexual abuse,” the archbishop said in March. “My focus, and the focus of the Archdiocese, is to do all we can to keep children safe while offering resources for help and healing.”

They’ve done a horrible job of it so far and their irresponsibility may finally be catching up to them.

For the sake of the victims, let’s hope justice prevails if the Church leaders are guilty of the allegations against them.
Complete Article HERE!

June 3, 2015

Cardinal Pell’s response to victims “almost sociopathic,” says member of pope’s sexual-abuse commission.

By Grant Gallicho

During the May 31 broadcast of Australia’s 60 Minutes, a member of Pope Francis’s sexual-abuse commission described Cardinal George Pell’s treatment of victims as “almost sociopathic.” The 60 Minutes segment focused on Pell’s response to abuse allegations while he ministered in Australia, including testimony alleging that the cardinal tried to buy a victim’s silence, and that he was involved in the decision to move the nation’s most notorious abuser priest, Gerald Ridsdale, between parishes—claims the cardinal denies. Pell, former archbishop of Sydney, was criticized for appearing with Ridsdale at his first trial in 1993 (Ridsdale was eventually convicted of more than one hundred counts of assault). The cardinal has a “catalogue of denials…a catalogue of denigrating people, of acting with callousness,” according to Peter Saunders, selected by Francis to serve on the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Saunders explained that he based his judgments on conversations with Australian victims. The cardinal’s position as prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy—the office created by Francis to oversee the Vatican’s finances—is “untenable,” Saunders said. “I would go as far to say,” he continued, “that I consider him to be quite a dangerous individual.”

Responses from Pell and from the Vatican spokesman came quickly. Before the program had even aired (after the network released promotional material), Pell issued statements calling Saunders’s comments “false” and “outrageous”—and suggested he might take legal action. (Saunders defended his remarks on June 1, saying they were “not slanderous.”) While acknowledging “the important work Mr. Saunders has done as a survivor of abuse to assist victims, including the establishment of a victims survivors group in the United Kingdom,” the cardinal suggested that Saunders had overstepped his role as a member of the pope’s sexual-abuse commission. The statutes of that body “make it clear that the Commission’s role does not include commenting on individual cases,” according to Pell, “nor does the commission have the capacity to investigate individual cases.”

Fr. Federico Lombardi, spokesman for the Holy See, made the same point in his June 1 statement. But he went further, stating that Pell’s responses to the Australian government’s investigation of child abuse have “always” been careful and thorough. The cardinal’s recent statements about 60 Minutes “must be considered reliable and worthy of respect and attention,” according to Lombardi. No doubt the cardinal’s statements about his role in the scandal deserve both respect and attention, but have they always been reliable? An episode from the recent past suggests not.

In 1982, according to Anthony Jones, he was sexually assaulted by Fr. Terence Goodall twice in one day. Jones was twenty-eight at the time. He says that he complained to church authorities the next day, but that they failed to mention the accusation to Goodall. Two decades later, Jones wrote a letter to the Archdiocese of Sydney detailing the alleged assault. (He was suing for $3.5 million.) The archdiocese launched an internal investigation. And on February 14, 2003, Pell wrote to Jones to tell him two things: that the investigator could not substantiate the allegation, and that there were no other complaints against Goodall—neither of which was true. (In 2005, Goodall would plead guilty to indecent assault, under old statutes that outlawed homosexual sex.)

In fact, as reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2008, the investigator’s report—which of course Pell read—did substantiate Jones’s allegation, along with another man’s accusation that Goodall had molested him when he was an altar boy. Pell wrote a letter to the other victim to inform him that his accusation had been substantiated—on the same day he wrote to Jones denying his claim. What’s more, documents obtained by ABC show church investigators were aware of several accusations against Goodall. Pell later admitted that his letter to Jones was “poorly put,” explaining that he had confused Jones’s allegation of assault with rape. “I was attempting to inform him that there was no other allegation of rape,” he said. But in another letter to Jones, also reported by ABC, Pell expanded on his reason for refusing to substantiate the allegation. “What cannot be determined by me, however, is whether it was a matter of sexual assault as you state, or homosexual behavior between two consenting adults as maintained by Fr. Goodall,” Pell wrote. “In the end it is a matter of your word against his.” Yet a police wiretap revealed that Goodall admitted to Jones that he never told the church investigator that their encounters were consensual. “I certainly did not say it was consensual, I don’t know where they got that from,” Goodall said.

“I acted to the best of my knowledge,” Pell told ABC when presented with news of the recording. “My judgment was vindicated when the prosecutors never alleged rape.” The cardinal acknowledged that he had met with Goodall to discuss the case. “I’m the superior of the priest,” he explained. “I’ve always got to be open to speak with the priest, especially if I’m telling him that it’s likely his time as a priest is over.” But he did not meet with Jones. He only sent him those two letters that misstated the findings of the investigation he had commissioned. “I don’t know who was lying,” Pell conceded, Goodall or Jones. “It’s very, very difficult to find out the truth in these situations.”
Complete Article HERE!

May 17, 2015

Catholic priest says he was fired from New Jersey college’s ministry over support of pro-gay marriage No H8 Campaign

BY Tobias Salinger

he former director of New Jersey school Seton Hall University’s campus ministry lost his job because he agreed on social media with a gay marriage equality group, Rev. Warren Hall said Friday on Twitter.

The tweet, which has been taken down, said he got canned for using his Facebook page to back California-based NoH8 Campaign, which began in 2008 in response to the state’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage.

“I’ve been fired from SHU for posting a pic on FB supporting LGBT ‘No H8’.” Hall previously wrote, according to NJ Advance Media. “I’m sorry it was met with this response. I’ll miss my work here.”

Representatives for the South Orange-based Roman Catholic university told the publication that the priest was appointed by the Archbishop of Newark and “serves at his discretion.”

A screenshot shows the tweet in which Hall announced he was fired Friday.

A spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, Jim Goodness, declined to disclose the reasons for Hall’s dismissal in an interview with NJ Advance Media. He said Hall was being reassigned within the archdiocese, which covers Bergen, Union, Hudson and Essex counties.

Goodness didn’t immediately return a request for comment early Sunday morning.

The move immediately provoked alumni and students, who started a Change.org petition demanding his reinstatement.

A file photo shows an entrance to Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., where controversy has erupted over the firing of the Catholic university’s campus ministry director.

“The Archdiocese of Newark’s decision to fire Father Warren Hall from Seton Hall University is in line with neither the teachings of Jesus Christ nor the words of Pope Francis,” the group’s letter to the archdiocese said.

The petition, which had garnered 1,225 signers by early Sunday morning, said Hall “contributed greatly to the academic and spiritual lives of the students.”

Efforts to contact Hall on Sunday morning were unsuccessful. He thanked his supporters in a Tweet he posted later Friday.

The controversy over a mainstay who provided spiritual guidance to the school’s sports teams erupted as the Pirates men’s basketball team attempted to recruit potential University of Massachusetts transfer Derrick Gordon, the first ever openly gay Division I player, the Asbury Park Press reported.

In 2010, the school began offering a course on the politics of gay marriage over the objections of Newark Archbishop John J. Myers, who heads both the Board of Regents and the Board of Trustees, the Newark Star-Ledger reported at the time. The school went ahead with the undergraduate seminar despite Myers’ objection that the class legitimized a point of view “running contrary to what the church teaches,” according to the publication.
Complete Article HERE!