Former Twin Cities bishop says he doesn’t recall abuse

ST. PAUL - A former auxiliary bishop who was a key figure in the Twin Cities archdiocese’s response to priest sex abuse from the 1980s to mid-1990s testified in a court deposition that he did not report to police the charges of child sex abuse that crossed his desk over the years and that he no longer remembers them.
The deposition of St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson was released Monday as part of a lawsuit making its way through the courts filed by an alleged victim of clergy sex abuse.
Carlson had been a point person behind the chancery’s investigation of Tom Adamson, a former priest accused of more than a dozen cases of child sex abuse who is the subject of the lawsuit. However, when asked about his interactions with Adamson - a high-profile case even back in the 1980s - or any actions he took against him, Carlson said he didn’t recall.
“I don’t remember with any accuracy what I did or didn’t do, but there are memos that would explain that,” said Carlson.
The Carlson deposition is the latest testimony of a high-ranking church official to be made public, following former Archbishop Harry Flynn and current Archbishop John Nienstedt and others. The depositions come in response to a lawsuit filed in 2013 on behalf of a man who claimed Adamson abused him in the 1970s at his St. Paul Park church.
All three high-ranking church officials - Carlson, Flynn, Nienstedt - said they could not recall the names of abusers on their watch and did not recall fundamental information about their cases.