This was all revealed when a canon lawyer, a brave woman named Jennifer Haselberger, told Minnesota Public Radio when she found evidence of a priest who apparently possessed child porn and internal memos discussing whether police should be notified. Archbishop John Nienstedt explained in a memo to the Vatican why he decided not to tell the cops: he was afraid of getting sued and going to jail.
It is unclear whether civil criminal action remains a possibility. The independent investigator hired to look into this matter concluded that 'many of the homosexual pornographic images viewed by this investigator and the computer analyst could be considered borderline illegal, because of the youthful looking images', but the decision of my predecessor was not to report the discovery of the images or the images themselves to law enforcement. My staff has expressed concern that the fact the CD-ROMs containing the images remain in the cleric's personnel file could expose the Archdiocese, as well as myself, to criminal prosecution. These factors also suggest that a penal trial, conducted in this Archdiocese or elsewhere in the United States, is to be avoided.This doesn't sound like a shepherd ministering to the souls in his congregation. It sounds like the CEO of an oil company shifting blame to his predecessor and staging a coverup after a massive oil spill. Many Minnesota Catholics are justifiably upset and have called for Nienstedt's resignation.
Now some wealthy donors are going to hit the archdiocese where it really hurts: the pocketbook. The archdiocese is launching a $160 million capital campaign, and some wealthy Catholic donors have said they will not contribute unless Nienstedt resigns. One quote in particular from a Nienstedt defender caught my attention:
To those calling for Nienstedt to be tossed out, Derus warned: “The Catholic Church is not a democracy. We don’t get to vote on this or that.”It's true that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. But lay Catholics do get a vote: they vote with their dollars. And with their feet.
And Catholics have been voting with the feet for centuries. That's how the Protestant Churches, and the Anglican Church, the Orthodox Churches, and all the other sects of the Christian Church were formed. It's called schism, and it often happens because of basic disagreements on doctrine and accusations of heresy. But it happens for political and social reasons as well.
Many Catholics are unhappy with the Church hierarchy. They view the bishops as arrogant and disconnected from the realities of everyday life, more concerned with covering up scandals than preventing them in the first place. The bishops yap dogmatically about birth control and abortion when they have no idea how hard it is to raise a family.
The ranks of the priesthood are being decimated, in large part because of the ban on married priests. Celibacy is not a scriptural requirement; priests could marry for a thousand years, and even today married Anglican priests joining the Catholic Church remain married. Celibacy is an antiquated relic of the Middle Ages enacted to prevent clergy from using Church money to create their own hereditary fiefdoms. Though the most public church sex scandals involve children, removing the marriage ban would also prevent many smaller-scale scandals involving priests who've simply fallen in love with consenting adult women.
Priests are also voting with their feet, and leaving their priesthood to marry. The priest who officiated at my wedding had to quit when he married a nun. A local political activist in my city did the same.
Why, many wonder, should priests be banned from the Church's most basic holy sacrament, the union of a man and a woman? In their arguments against gay marriage the archbishops claim that union to be the bedrock of society, yet they have no personal knowledge of it.
Women are tired of the way nuns are treated, and many resent the fact that women are not allowed to be priests. Many Christian churches allow women pastors these days, in particular the Anglican Church, which split off because of a political tiff when the Vatican was slow to grant Henry VIII an annulment from Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was too old to give him the son he desperately desired. Ironically, the son he strove so hard for died at age 15, and Henry was ultimately succeeded by his daughter, Elizabeth, who ruled for more than 40 years: she and Queen Victoria were arguably the two best monarchs to rule England. The fact that Pope Benedict cleared the way for married Anglican priests to join the Church shows how close the two Churches really are.
Many straight Catholics are unhappy with the way the Church treats gays: Nienstedt spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of Church money to amend the Minnesota constitution to ban gay marriage, an attempt that failed in 2012. Considering how many priests are gay (estimates run as high as 60%), and how the marriage ban discourages straight priests, it is evident that the Church's dogmas are seriously out of balance with reality.
Francis, the new pope, has said many things that give people hope (he even had a girlfriend before he entered the priesthood). The Church often takes decades and even centuries to change, but just one ex cathedra pronouncement could completely alter the Church's trajectory. The ban on women priests is a dogma, but the marriage ban is a regulation and therefore subject to papal decree.
If straight Catholics opt out of the priesthood in large numbers, gays may quietly assume control of archdioceses around the world. Is it only a matter of time before the majority of the Roman curia is gay?
A Third Vatican Council composed of a majority of gay bishops could decide pretty much anything: the Catholic Church isn't a democracy, after all.
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