Former official: Archdiocese didn't report priest's pornography

Upset that her superiors had refused to take action, a former church official reported to police that leaders of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis had kept secret for eight years images of pornography — some of it appearing to show children — belonging to one of its priests.

Jennifer Haselberger, the archdiocese's former chancellor for canonical affairs, marched the images she'd found into the offices of one church leader after another in May 2012. But none responded.

The last straw for Haselberger came after she provided Archbishop John Nienstedt with copies of some of the images she had discovered in the archdiocese's files on the Rev. Jonathan Shelley, 52. She said the photos appeared to show boys performing oral sex. The Rev. Peter Laird, the archdiocese's vicar general at the time, Nienstedt's deputy, ordered her to hand over the pornographic images.

"I did as I was told," said Haselberger, who resigned in April. "I went back to my office. I closed the door and I called Ramsey County."

But officers with the St. Paul Police Department's sex crimes and vice units couldn't find the child pornography that Haselberger had reported, despite multiple reviews of the three disks of evidence the archdiocese had handed over.

Investigating officer Sgt. William Gillet wondered in a report he filed Sunday whether he'd received what he asked for when visiting the archdiocese's offices in March.

"It should be noted I do not have the computer [that housed the child pornography,] as we were told that was destroyed many years ago," Gillet wrote in his report. "Whether these disks given to me were the actual disks or copies of those disks after first asking for them, I do not know nor will I most likely ever know."

Archdiocese spokesman Jim Accurso told MPR News that no documentation exists that corroborates Haselberger's story.

"You've got hearsay from Jennifer," Accurso said.

Tom Ring, a Ramsey County assistant attorney who has served on an archdiocesan conciliation board, told police during their investigation that former Archbishop Harry Flynn had already looked into the Shelley matter. 

Flynn, Ring said, "didn't believe there was anything further to do," according to the police report. Attempts to contact Flynn, who retired in 2008, were unsuccessful.

Federal law prohibits "possession of any image of child pornography." 

Minnesota state law requires priests to report to authorities any indication that a child has been sexually abused within the last three years. Withholding that information is against the law.

Shelley, who lives in Minneapolis, denied he did anything illegal.

"There was no criminal stuff involved in it or wherever, and it was 10 years ago," Shelley told a reporter from MPR News. "If you're going to take my name and drag it through the mud now, 10 years later, for something that you clearly don't know all the facts on, that's something you're free to do. But I'm not going to add to it."

Nienstedt placed Shelley on sabbatical in June of last year. He had been assigned to the Parish of St. John the Baptist in Hugo, Minn., since 2008.

The Shelley episode comes less than two weeks after an MPR News investigation revealed that archdiocesan leaders hid sexual misconduct by one of its priests while allowing him to continue in ministry.

Also, Laird, who has been second in command at the archdiocese since 2009, resigned Thursday afternoon amid growing concerns over the way the archdiocese has handled allegations of clergy sex abuse.

"This was the computer from the parish priest"

Joe Ternus was the person who alerted church leaders to the pornography he found on Shelley's computer. The priest, then assigned to St. Jude of the Lake parish in Mahtomedi, Minn., had given the laptop to Ternus' father, who thought his grandchildren might use it for playing computer games.

"It was graphic. It was hard-core," Ternus said of the images he found on the laptop. 

"Just kind of freaked out everybody. I mean, this was something that a bunch of 6-, 7- and 8-year-old kids were going to be using, and this was what was on there waiting for them, if somebody hadn't taken the time to go in and look for it. And apart from that, this was the computer from the parish priest where my family went."

Ternus reported his discovery to the Rev. Kevin McDonough, then-vicar general and second in command at the archdiocese. He gave McDonough the computer's hard drive so the archdiocese could investigate.

McDonough, he said, gave him all manner of assurances when they met about the pornography in 2004. 

"This was going to be taken care of," he said. "Jon Shelley was going to get appropriate counseling, or however it was that they put it at the time. And the thing we all wanted to make sure was this wasn't going to be treated like all of the things we'd seen in the news to that point, where people get picked up and moved around and things get swept under the rug."

That was 2004, two years after the clergy sex abuse scandal rocked the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. 

Dioceses around the country were putting child safety plans in place, after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops mandated specific processes and protocols for protecting children and reporting suspected child sexual abuse and exploitation.

"Thousands of images"

Richard Setter & Associates, a private investigation firm retained by the archdiocese, hired a forensic computer expert to look at some of the files on Shelley's computer. 

The search uncovered "thousands of images," including some child pornography, police investigator Gillet wrote in his report Sunday.

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Haselberger had begun looking at Shelley's personnel file in 2011 because the priest was up for a promotion. That's where, she said, she discovered what looked like sexually explicit images of children. 

The CDs from Shelley’s old laptop sat in the chancery — the archdiocese’s main offices on Summit Avenue in St. Paul — for four more years. In 2008, they were moved to the basement of the building.

Haselberger said the disks were stored with a warning.

"There was a handwritten note attached to those CD-ROMs in Fr. McDonough's handwriting, saying something to the effect of 'don't insert these disks into a computer that’s attached to the Internet' and 'see previous report prior to viewing images,'" she said.

Haselberger told Laird what she'd found in Shelley's file and on the disks. 

Laird told Haselberger to "put them back in the vault," Gillet wrote in his report.

Police asked church officials to turn over the evidence on March 5 of this year during a visit to the archdiocese's main offices in St. Paul. 

The response of Andrew Eisenzimmer, the now-retired archdiocesan legal counsel and chancellor for civil affairs, to that request caught investigator Gillet by surprise.

"Eisenzimmer was visibly upset" and asked for the name of the priest involved, Gillet wrote in his report. "Eisenzimmer went so far as to say that he needed to know which property we were talking about. We were surprised with this, as it suggested to us the possibility that there might be more than one case of pornographic materials the church was dealing with."

Gillet agreed to leave the archdiocese offices without the file containing the pornography and documents. He wrote in his report that he would call Eisenzimmer back with the priest's name, then collect the evidence.

But church officials did not provide Gillet with anything until two days later when Tom Wieser, a St. Paul lawyer, called to say the sergeant could collect three computer disks from his office. 

Wieser declined to give Gillet the church's internal documents, "saying they were the product of their investigation," Gillet wrote in his report. "Such documents are not necessary at this time."

Police closed the case Wednesday morning. 

No one has been charged with any crime in connection to the case.