Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Other Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Collegeville, Minnesota, USA · 2015

United States: St John's Abbey settlement forces release of internal files naming 19 Benedictine monks credibly accused of child sexual abuse

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

St John's Abbey, Order of Saint Benedict, Roman Catholic monastic community operating St John's Preparatory School, Collegeville, Minnesota

Organization

St John's Abbey, Order of Saint Benedict

Spiritual nexus

The named monks held authority over students at the Abbey's own preparatory school as both teachers and members of the monastic community; the finding of 'credible accusation' is the Abbey's own institutional process, published only because a civil settlement compelled its disclosure.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority
  • Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2015-04-25 · official institutional disclosure compelled by settlement

    Stearns County, Minnesota civil settlement (court-ordered disclosure). As a condition of settling a Stearns County lawsuit brought by a man abused as a student at St John's Preparatory School in 1977, St John's Abbey released personnel files, running to roughly 15,000 pages, on 19 monks it had determined were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors. The Abbey's list, maintained by its own External Review Board process established in 2003, was later expanded further; as of subsequent updates the Abbey's own list named 21 monks credibly accused.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • monastic and educational authority over students at the Abbey-run preparatory school
  • an internal External Review Board process, in place since 2003, that determined which accusations were 'credible' without criminal referral in most cases

Primary record

Sources

national newspaper court reporting investigation report National Catholic Reporter, 'Sexual abuse at St. John's Abbey revealed in 15,000-page disclosure' (2015).

Reports the settlement-compelled release of files on 19 monks and the scale of the disclosed documentation.

national newspaper court reporting court reporting Star Tribune, 'St. John's Abbey to open sex-abuse files on 19 monks in legal settlement' (2015).

Confirms the settlement terms and the 19-monk figure at the time of the 2015 disclosure.

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