Official finding 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

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

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

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

Cited 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.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/sexual-abuse-st-johns-abbey-revealed-15000-page-disclosure Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: investigation-report. SHA-256 c9ff7a608323923c267af4ef10daa06ddac46b6ce47a3fd1a1614fd08d6dda7f
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: http://www.startribune.com/st-john-s-abbey-to-open-sex-abuse-files-on-19-monks/301556871/ Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: court-reporting.
Retrieval: 2026-07-27 · Retrieval failed; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

Named in this record? Request a correction, report a changed disposition, or submit a response.

Related record

Related cases · Christian institutions & contexts

Browse all 796 Christian institutions & contexts records

← Explore all cases