News Story of the Day

Two months ago, news broke that a priest in the Diocese of Trenton had been exchanging sexually charged text messages with someone he thought was a 16-year-old boy.

I was that fictitious boy.

There’s another lawsuit against the Catholic Church over more sexual abuse claims.

The lawsuit names the Order of St. Benedict/St. John’s Abbey, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Saint Luke Institute and Father Francis Hoefgen as defendants.

It was June 21, 2012, and the Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer was about to be confronted by officials of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The pastor of Blessed Sacrament Parish in St. Paul had been under church supervision for sexual misconduct, and a mother had recently confronted him with suspicions that he was abusing her son. Now she had gone to officials at the chancery.

In Ritual Bathhouses of the Jewish Orthodoxy, Children Are Systematically Abused

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Law enforcement authorities on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota have opened an investigation into alleged sexual abuse of children by a Minnesota priest.

TROY — The St. Louis archdiocese asked a judge Wednesday to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the archbishop of failing to report child sexual abuse allegations against a priest he lived with and apparently mentored.

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis was at the forefront of extensive lobbying against efforts to expand the time limit for lawsuits by victims of childhood sexual abuse, according to a document obtained by the Star Tribune.

The morning after Toledo Bishop Leonard P. Blair was named to take over the Hartford Archdiocese, a Connecticut representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests was on the front steps of the Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Hartford to air the organization’s concerns about the appointment.

The SNAP member, Gail Howard of Redding, said she was there with her husband Wednesday in part to draw attention to Blair’s behavior regarding the nationally publicized case of the Rev. Gerald Robinson, a Toledo diocesan priest, who ultimately was convicted in 2006 of killing a nun 26 years earlier.

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — A video statement obtained exclusively by WCCO shows a Minnesota woman describing alleged abuse by a Catholic priest.

Her case is part of a growing scandal accusing a cover-up by top officials of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Speaking truth to power and doing what you say you will do are hallmarks of credibility — whether it’s a person or an organization.

In the case of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul, a person — the Rev. Bill Deziel — is speaking truth to power because an organization — the archdiocese — is not doing what it said it will do.