Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.
by Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica, and Andy Mannix, Minnesota Star Tribune, photography by Leila Navidi, Minnesota Star Tribune
November 20, 2025, 6:00 am

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Reporting Highlights

* Protecting an Abuser: Leaders of a Minnesota church didn’t report a parishioner to police though they knew he’d sexually abused girls for years and had been told reporting it was their duty.

* Forgive and Forget: Church leaders held meetings where children were told to forgive the man who sexually abused them and forget the abuse. If they spoke of it, the sin would be theirs.

* Missed Opportunities: Prosecutors had at least one opportunity to intervene but hoped educating church leaders about their duties would encourage them to cooperate with authorities.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

[www.propublica.org]

(Risk factors for abuse highlighted by Corboy. Large families means women are stuck at home and not allowed adult autonomy to decide how many children to have.

Pregnancy increases risk of domestic abuse and makes it harder to leave one's abuser.

Older children, especially girls, are at high risk of parentification - losing normal socialization and schooling to function as unpaid babysitters.

(Quote)(Old Apostolic Lutheran Church) OALC is a conservative Christian revival movement that came to the U.S. with 19th-century settlers from Norway, Finland and Sweden, and it is not affiliated with any mainstream Lutheran denominations. There is no official count, but one academic study estimated 31,000 members worldwide as of 2016, with most in the United States. The church is rapidly growing, experts say, and the member count today is likely much higher.

OALC’s emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Washington state and Duluth.

There are 33 OALC churches in the U.S. and Canada. Only men hold leadership positions. The less formal nature of OALC structure — a spokesperson said there’s no headquarters in the U.S. — means that, unlike sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church or Southern Baptist Convention, there’s no central authority to hold accountable. Still, news of the criminal case against Massie spread widely in the insular OALC, inspiring more victims to come forward in Minnesota and other states.(Unquote)

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Then the girl’s dad and preacher allowed the man who had been sexually abusing her since kindergarten to hug her.

“It was one of the worst things ever,” she told police some 15 years later.

In accordance with one of the core tenets of their church, the matter was resolved. It was forgiven. It should now be forgotten. If she spoke of it again, she would be guilty of having an unforgiving heart and the sins would become hers

They have weaponized the call to forgiveness.

It's become part of the strategy predators use to disarm their prey.

It reminds me of the "there is no right or wrong" trick of the nonduality gurus. Same predator-prey relationship, just a different spin.