VATICAN CITY -- The archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis and his deputy resigned Monday after prosecutors recently accused the archdiocese of failing to protect youths from abuse by a pedophile priest.
Separately, the Vatican announced it had indicted Jozef Wesolowski, its own former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, on charges of sexually abusing minors in the Caribbean country and possessing child pornography. He will be the highest-ranking Vatican official ever to stand trial for a sex crime.
Archbishop John Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee Anthony Piche stepped down after Minnesota prosecutors charged their archdiocese, accusing it of failing to protect children from harm by a pedophile priest who was later convicted of molesting two boys.
The developments came days after Francis approved the creation of a new tribunal inside the Vatican to hear cases of bishops accused of failing to protect minors, answering years of criticism that top-ranked churchmen have long been immune to punishment for ignoring or covering up for priests who rape and molest children.
In Rome, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said he did not know whether the two bishops, by resigning, had avoided a trial by the new tribunal.
They quit under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign before they retire because of illness or some other "grave" reason that makes them unfit for office.
Earlier this month, prosecutors charged the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis as a corporation with having "turned a blind eye" to repeated reports of inappropriate behavior by the priest. The complaint did not name any individuals.
The charges came two years after diocesan canon lawyer-turned-whistleblower Jennifer Haselberger alleged a widespread cover-up of clergy sex misconduct in the archdiocese, saying archbishops and their top staff lied to the public and ignored the U.S. bishops' pledge to have no tolerance of priests who abuse.
Haselberger, who was Nienstedt's archivist, accused the church of using a chaotic system of record keeping that helped conceal the backgrounds of guilty priests who remained on assignment.
She said she repeatedly warned Nienstedt and his aides about the risk of keeping accused priests in ministry, but they took action only in one case. As a result of raising alarms, she said she was eventually shut out of meetings about priest misconduct and later resigned.
Nienstedt refused to resign after Haselberger's accusations, and later after announcing that allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior had been made against him. He denied misconduct and the archdiocese hired a firm to investigate. No results were ever announced and recently Nienstedt hired his own attorney to look at the matter again.
In a statement Monday, Nienstedt said he was stepping down to give the archdiocese a new beginning. But he insisted he was leaving "with a clear conscience knowing that my team and I have put in place solid protocols to ensure the protection of minors and vulnerable adults."
In a statement, Piche said: "The people of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis need healing and hope. I was getting in the way of that, and so I had to resign."
"This has been a painful process," the Rev. Andrew Cozzens, an auxiliary bishop for the archdiocese who will remain in his post, said during a news conference. "A change in leadership offers us an opportunity for greater healing and the ability to move forward."
In accepting the resignations, the pope appointed the Rev. Bernard Hebda, an assistant archbishop of Newark, as apostolic administrator to oversee the archdiocese.
Monday's resignations bring to 18 the number of bishops who have stepped down after being publicly criticized for covering up for abusers, according to Anne Barrett Doyle of the online resource BishopAccountability.org.
In April, Francis accepted the resignation of U.S. Bishop Robert Finn, who had been convicted in a U.S. court of failing to report a suspected child abuser.
Francis has pledged that not even high-ranking churchmen will get away with abuse or cover-up.
The criminal charges against the archdiocese in Minnesota, filed June 5 by the Ramsey County attorney, John Choi, stem from its handling of Curtis Wehmeyer, 50, a former priest at Church of the Blessed Sacrament in St. Paul, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for molesting two boys and faces prosecution involving a third in Wisconsin.
The 44-page criminal complaint states that concerns about Wehmeyer date to the 1990s, when he was in seminary and supervisors suggested that his past sexual promiscuity and alcohol abuse made him a poor candidate for the priesthood.
Prosecutors say church leaders failed to respond to "numerous and repeated reports of troubling conduct" by Wehmeyer. The criminal complaint says many people -- including parishioners, fellow priests and parish staff -- reported problems with Wehmeyer, and many of those claims were discounted.
Jeff Anderson, an attorney who has filed lawsuits against the Catholic Church over abuse allegations, said Monday's resignations are part of an "important reckoning" for the failure of top officials to respond appropriately when priests are accused of abusing children.
But David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said the Vatican should do much more to clean up the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
He said the acceptance of the two resignations "doesn't feel like reform" and that Francis should move to defrock top church leaders in the archdiocese.
The resignations came on the same day the Vatican announced it was putting Wesolowski, the former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, on trial in a Vatican court. Wesolowski, who has already been defrocked after being convicted in a canon law court, now faces possible jail time if convicted by the criminal tribunal of the Vatican City State.
The case of the former envoy and archbishop caused an international scandal when it was learned that the Vatican had secretly recalled him from Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, before officials in the Caribbean nation could investigate, saying that he could not be tried in the Dominican Republic because he had diplomatic immunity.
Wesolowski came to the attention of Dominican authorities after a television journalist aired an investigation reporting that the ambassador had a habit of picking up shoeshine boys along the waterfront and taking them to secluded spots. Some boys said he gave them money to molest them.
The former ambassador was defrocked by the Vatican in June 2014 and has been awaiting a criminal trial by the Vatican since then. It will be the first trial on sexual-abuse charges held under new rules for criminal procedures put in place by Pope Francis. It was not known until Monday that the Vatican would also file child pornography charges against the former ambassador.
The Vatican said in announcing the trial that these were "serious charges" and that it would be a "delicate and detailed procedure." It is set to begin July 11.
A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini, said Vatican officials had found child pornography on the former ambassador's computer, and dated it to Wesolowski's time in the Dominican Republic.
The case has been highly sensitive, given that the Polish-born Wesolowski was an ambassador of the Holy See -- a direct representative of the pope and not just one of the world's 440,000 priests -- and had been ordained both a priest and a bishop by St. John Paul II.
Information for this article was contributed by Nicole Winfield of The Associated Press and by Mark S. Getzfred, Mitch Smith, Laurie Goodstein and Gaia Pianigiani of The New York Times.
A Section on 06/16/2015