The former top canon lawyer for the Roman Catholic diocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul has filed an affidavit with the court suggesting that the Archbishop of that Diocese was not truthful under oath. The charges were made in a 107-page affidavit filed as part of an abuse lawsuit earlier this week. The attorney who’s filing the lawsuit said “We've never seen or had revealed to us the inner-workings of an archdiocese and top officials in real time”.
This is not “old news”. It’s current news, as recent as this week, about the secretive activities of bishops to protect pedophile priests, even today. This one is an accusation of cover-up from an insider.
The affidavit comes at a critical time in a massive clergy sexual abuse lawsuit filed against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and the Diocese of Winona by attorney Jeff Anderson….
The case has already forced the depositions of [current Archbishop] Nienstedt, former Archbishop Harry Flynn, St. Louis archbishop Robert Carlson, and other top officials. It's also required church officials to turn over more than 60,000 pages of internal documents. Van de North had ordered church officials in December to disclose the names of abusive priests, as well.
Haselberger's sweeping account offers an unprecedented look at how Catholic leaders handled clergy sexual abuse from 2008 to 2013. It appears to provide key evidence to back up Anderson's claim that the archdiocese has continued to put children at risk of sexual assault. And it comes as the archdiocese considers whether to file for bankruptcy as it faces an onslaught of abuse cases allowed under a state law that gives victims more time to sue.
Read more …
Learn more about how they do it:
Rome’s Institutionally Sanctioned Lying
The Official Roman Catholic Policy of Obstruction of Justice
From the article:
ReplyDeleteHaselberger resigned in April 2013 in protest over the archdiocese's handling of abuse cases. She contacted MPR News in July 2013 and disclosed how [Archbishop] Nienstedt and other top officials gave special payments to abusive priests, failed to report alleged sex crimes to police and kept some abusers in ministry. Her account was especially stunning because it involved decisions made by church leaders as recently as April 2013.
Haselberger's affidavit includes many of those claims.
She also describes an interview she gave to attorneys at the Greene Espel law firm earlier this year about Nienstedt. Haselberger said the firm was "hired by the Archdiocese in January or February of 2014 to investigate allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct on the part of Archbishop Nienstedt with seminarians, priests, and other adult men during Archbishop Nienstedt's time as a priest in the Archdiocese of Detroit, as Bishop of New Ulm, and while Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis."