St. Louis Catholic Archbishop Robert Carlson has released a statement and a video saying he has understood for his entire adult life that sexual abuse is a “grave evil and a criminal offense.”
The statement is an attempt to respond to the release of video of a deposition Carlson gave last month as part of a sexual abuse lawsuit in Minnesota. Carlson and the St. Louis archdiocese say his comments in that deposition have been “misconstrued” to suggest that Carlson was not aware it was a criminal offense for an adult to molest a child. The archdiocese has said in a statement that the exchange in question was about Minnesota’s child abuse reporting law, not whether it was illegal to molest a child.
The full deposition, released by the attorney that conducted the deposition, can be viewed below. The exchange that sparked controversy regarding what Archbishop Carlson understood about the law can be found at about 2-hours, 32-minutes and 48 seconds into the video:
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