"Church in Crisis ... By PATRICIA LEFEVERE ... Collegeville, Minn. ... Ed Vessel said he was ''disinvited'' to the Oct. 1 news conference at which St. John’s Abbey and Jeffrey Anderson, attorney for victims of sexual abuse by abbey monks, jointly announced a broad financial settlement of claims against the abbey. ... ''I was stopped from going in by two St. John’s security guards and two sheriff’s deputies, even though I told them I’d had a hand in helping with the case,'' Vessel told NCR. Vessel’s case was not one of the ones in the latest round of settlements. ... For 24 years Vessel has been, by his own account, ''the lion at the gate'' of St. John’s attempting to get the abbey to acknowledge that Fr. Richard Eckroth molested his son and exhibited inappropriate sexual conduct with two of his three daughters in the 1970s, when the monk took them and scores of other children to the secluded lakeside cabin owned by the Benedictines near Bemidji, Minn. ... "
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