Homophobic bishops quit in child abuse cover-up scandal

This video from the USA says about itself:

2 July 2014

John Nienstedt, the Catholic archbishop who championed the failed effort to ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota, is facing a church investigation over allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships with other men, including priests and seminary students.

Read more here.

Another video from the USA used to say about itself:

Minnesota Archbishop John Nienstedt Claims Satan Behind Gay Marriage

16 September 2013

Fornicators beware: sodomy, condoms and pornography are the work of the devil.

That’s the message of a speech posted online last week by the Catholic Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, John C. Nienstedt. A controversial religious leader with a stridently anti-gay stance, Nienstedt originally made the comments while speaking to the conservative Napa Institute Conference on August 2. The speech detailed the importance of family, as well as the devil’s multiple attempts to weaken the institution of heterosexual marriage.

“Today, many evil forces have set their sights on the dissolution of marriage and the debasing of family life,” Nienstedt said. “Sodomy, abortion, contraception, pornography, the redefinition of marriage, and the denial of objective truth are just some of the forces threatening the stability of our civilization. The source of these machinations is none other than the Father of Lies. Satan knows all too well the value that the family contributes to the fabric of a good solid society, as well as the future of God’s work on earth.”

In Nienstedt’s opinion of course, “family” means specifically a union “comprised of one man and one woman.” Delivered one day after Minnesota began issuing same-sex marriage licenses, the Napa Institute speech is consistent with the archbishop’s public statements condemning gay marriage, notes The New Civil Rights Movement.

Voted Minneapolis blog City Pages’ Best Villain of the Twin Cities in 2013, Nienstedt has “used his position to bully proponents and demonize fellow Catholics who disagreed with him,” wrote the blog’s Jesse Marx. “He donated more than $650,000 of church money to the anti-gay-marriage cause.”

In October of 2012, Nienstedt found himself at the center of a similar controversy when a letter he wrote surfaced in which he tells the mother a young gay man that she must reject her son or go to hell herself.

“I write to inform you that the teaching of the Catholic Church on homosexuality, as described in paragraphs 2357 and 2358 and 2359 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is rooted in Scripture and based on the Natural Moral Law,” Nienstedt wrote, according to ThinkProgress. “Catholics are bound in conscience to believe this teaching. Those who do not cannot consider themselves to be Catholic and ought not to participate in the sacramental life of the Church… Your eternal salvation may well depend upon a conversation of heart on this topic.”

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Senior US bishops quit after ignoring child sexual abuse

Tuesday 16th June 2015

TWO senior US Catholic bishops quit yesterday after failing to stop child abuse and a former church envoy to the Dominican Republic was charged with paedophilia.

The Vatican announced that Pope Francis had accepted the resignations of archbishop John Nienstedt and auxiliary bishop Lee Anthony Piche of the Archdiocese of St Paul and Minneapolis.

Local prosecutors had charged the archdiocese itself with having “turned a blind eye” to repeated reports of inappropriate behaviour by a priest who was later convicted of molesting two boys.

Curtis Wehmeyer, a former priest at Church of the Blessed Sacrament in St Paul, is serving a five-year sentence and faces prosecution for offenses involving a third boy in Wisconsin.

Prosecutors said that church leaders had failed to respond to “numerous and repeated reports of troubling conduct” by Mr Wehmeyer from the time he entered a seminary until he was removed from the priesthood this year.

Canon law allows the two bishops to resign before retirement age if illness or some other “grave” reason makes them unfit for office.

The resignations of Mr Nienstedt and Mr Piche came just days after the Pope approved the creation of a new Vatican tribunal to hear cases of bishops who had ignored abuse by priests.

In April, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of US bishop Robert Finn, who had been convicted in a US court of failing to report a suspected child abuser.

The church also announced yesterday that former papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic Jozef Wesolowski had been charged with abusing young boys and possessing child pornography.

Mr Wesolowski was recalled by the Holy See in 2013 after rumours surfaced in Santo Domingo that he paid shoeshine boys to masturbate.

He has since been defrocked and placed under a form of house arrest inside Vatican City pending a decision by the Vatican criminal court on whether to charge him.

Ordained both as a priest and a bishop by late pope John Paul II, Mr Wesolowski is the highest-ranking Vatican official to have been charged with sex offences.