A Minnesota church told kids to hug and forgive their abuser. Then he found more victims.

Church leaders ignored the mandatory reporting law, pressured victims to forgive and forget, and obstructed justice for years

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What’s the right way to reconcile with a person who abused you when you were a child?

There’s no single answer to that. But there sure as hell is a wrong way. Like your father driving you to a nearby parking lot to meet your pastor and the man who abused you so that everyone can hug it out... and then never speak of it again.

That’s what Daryl Bruckelmyer, the pastor of Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth, Minnesota, suggested they do.

In front of the girl, her father and Bruckelmyer, [Clint] Massie asked her for forgiveness. Looming over her, the three men wept. 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.

But she could never forget. And neither could the other children.

Other children?! Yes. Lots of other children.

That’s just the opening of a harrowing article written by Jessica Lussenhop of ProPublica and Andy Mannix of the Minnesota Star Tribune. They say Bruckelmyer knew exactly what Massie had done to that girl—and many others in the church—but his solution always involved “forgiveness sessions”… and never reporting Massie to law enforcement.

Minnesota is a state where members of the clergy are mandated reporters. That means they are legally required to inform law enforcement officials if they learn about child abuse. Like most states, there’s an exception if they learn this information through the act of confession (which is the excuse Catholic priests use to shield sex predators), but Bruckelmyer learned about Massie’s actions outside that scope. He should have reported it. He chose not to.

Then, because there were no real consequences to what Massie did, the abuse continued, victim after victim. It was only this year when he was finally sentenced to over seven years in prison for multiple counts of “felony criminal sexual conduct with victims under the age of 13.” The fact that he was sentenced was not because of church cooperation, though, but rather because people finally went around the church.

Clint Massie

Law enforcement there first became aware of the allegations against Massie in 2017. They said that the church’s lack of cooperation — including pressuring potential witnesses and victims to stay quiet about the abuse and preachers failing to report it to authorities — was a major factor in the delay in bringing charges.

One of the reasons the church never ratted Massie out is because they had an internal policy on how to handle allegations of wrongdoing. The solutions included things like “taking care of the soul”—but never telling the cops what was happening. That meant Bruckelmyer faced no punishment for standing in the way of justice, no matter how long the list of victims got.

So how did law enforcement finally find out what Massie was up to, if not from the pastor?

Let’s start with the girl who was told to hug her abuser. She began meeting with a secular counselor when she was 16, and when she talked about her childhood and what Massie did to her, the counselor (a mandated reporter who actually took her job seriously) told law enforcement, which then got more details from the girl.

Sgt. Jessica LaBore was the investigator assigned to the case. In a recorded interview, the girl reluctantly told LaBore how she used to sit with Massie and his wife, Sarah, at church, just a few rows from the front. Massie would snake his hands up her skirt and touch her thighs and genitals. Another time, at a gathering at the home of her parents’ friends, she said, Massie told her to get a blanket and began touching her underneath it, with her mom and dad nearby.

Despite all this, the girl remains in the same church to this day because she believes she’s “in the right place.” Her parents, too, stopped cooperating with the investigation because they firmly believed the church’s “forgive and forget” policy was the right one. In fact, the girl’s mother said later that she believed Massie “learned his lesson”… even though he was still targeting other girls. Lots of Stockholm Syndrome to go around…

Because the family didn’t want to cooperate with the cops, that meant the cops couldn’t reasonably press charges against Massie. But at least he was on their radar.

Over the next few years, the police received anonymous tips that Massie was still abusing children and that Bruckelmyer knew about it. But the victims still weren’t speaking up. So they tried a different approach: trying to educate Bruckelmyer about mandated reporting:

LaBore explained the state’s mandated reporting law to Bruckelmyer and told him that he and others at the church could be charged criminally if “somebody that they already know about” were to keep abusing children and they failed to report it.

…

“I believed it was more effective to work with existing leadership to influence practices and attitudes regarding child abuse reporting, rather than to pursue criminal enforcement at that stage,” [Deputy St. Louis County Attorney Jon] Holets wrote. “That said, criminal charges for failure to report remain a possibility in such cases.”

When LaBore spoke to Bruckelmyer, she read him the entire mandated reporter law over the phone, line by line, then texted it to him.

They were treating this grown-ass man as a child who didn’t know how basic laws worked. They gave him the benefit of the doubt even though he had done nothing to deserve it. And none of it worked. Bruckelmyer didn’t change. He refused to do everything in his power to protect children. Hell, he refused to do anything in his power that could have prevented further abuse.

It wasn’t until 2023 that things finally changed when one of Massie’s own relatives told police about the abuse she suffered at his hands. At this point, a new officer, Sgt. Adam Kleffman, took over the case and decided to contact the girl from 2017 whose family didn’t want to cooperate with his office. Maybe things had changed in the intervening years. The girl was, after all, now a married mother who still carried the trauma of what had occurred in her childhood.

That suspicion proved to be correct. She finally spoke up. And with the help of these two survivors, Kleffman began contacting other potential victims. It didn’t always go well, though:

One woman told Kleffman that Massie had asked for forgiveness. The sin, she said in the recorded call, was “washed away in the blood of reconciliation.”

“It is gone forever,” she told Kleffman.

“So you’re following what the church says to do,” Kleffman replied.

“I am following what God says to do,” the woman told him, before hanging up.

At one point, Kleffman and his colleague brought Massie in for questioning and he openly admitted that “there could be hundreds” of girls (!) who might have stories about him “touching or kissing them.” Unless they were willing to testify against him, however, it wasn’t clear what charges they could file against him.

The cops also brought in Bruckelmyer and fellow preacher Calvin Raisanen to talk about all this—and about their obligation as mandated reporters. They told the preachers that telling a child to forgive and forget could be seen as “witness tampering” because they’d be pressuring the child to remain silent. But the preachers pleaded ignorance and acted like they had no clue what their responsibilities were… even though it had been explained to them—”line by line”—years earlier. (In the video below, the police are on the left. The preachers are on the right.)

You can hear the preachers say in that video that of course they told the victims they could speak to law enforcement. But they also told those girls to forgive and forget, and bringing up the issue again was violating God’s will. Even if they weren’t preventing the girls from going to the cops, they very much nudged them in the opposite direction,

By the time Massie faced criminal charges, Bruckelmyer avoided any penalties for failing to report abuse to law enforcement because the statute of limitations had run out.

And because it took so long for the charges to be filed—largely because of the negligence of the pastors at this church—many of the victims saw no justice whatsoever for what happened to them.

Court filings listed nine alleged victims, but only three of the cases resulted in charges of felony sexual conduct with a victim under the age of 13. The statute of limitations under South Dakota law had run out for [Kristi] Bertolotto and [Kyla] Chamberlin. And the girl who’d been pressured to forgive Massie in Bruckelmyer’s office hadn’t had her case charged either; under Minnesota law, too much time had passed between her initial report in 2017 and the prosecution.

Nevertheless, six of the alleged victims whose cases didn’t result in charges were still part of the case, and some of the women traveled to Duluth in December 2024 to testify at Massie’s trial. Just after jury selection, Massie agreed to plead guilty to four felony counts. One charge was dropped.

It’s significant that he pleaded guilty on his own before a trial began because that meant the survivors never got to take the stand to describe what Massie did to them. They also never got to explain how the church (mis)handled everything. Without this reporting, the chances are we wouldn’t be hearing their stories at all.

Some of the survivors have now filed lawsuits against Massie, their church, and the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church of America. But none of this prevents the church from continuing to downplay the seriousness of what happened. There’s no indication they’re going to change their policies in a way that might prevent this kind of abuse in the future.

If we can take any lessons from this story, it’s that these situations are never just about one predator. It’s about the entire religious system engineered to protect him. It shows how “forgiveness,” when treated as a weapon, can become a shield for abusers and a cage for the abused. This church demanded forgiveness, forgetting that forgiveness is something that must be earned. That’s why it was never a pathway to healing.

That’s also why mandated reporting exists: because institutions and pastors and self-anointed moral authorities cannot be trusted to police themselves when the stakes are this high. Clergy members who bury abuse under the rubble of “reconciliation” aren’t offering spiritual care; they’re obstructing justice. They would rather protect the institution than the children. It makes them complicit in the crimes.

Bruckelmyer wasn’t uninformed. He was told repeatedly, slowly, by police, what he was supposed to do in these situations. Instead of taking the responsible path forward, he chose silence and secrecy. He chose to side with the predator, allowing the abuse to continue, destroying lives in its wake.

It’s yet another reason clergy must be held accountable in these cases. The Catholic Church fought mandated reporting laws in Washington because it didn’t carve out an exception for confessions. But in Minnesota, where those exceptions exist, clergy members still didn’t follow the law. At what point can we all agree that mandated reporting doesn’t work with clergy members because they only see it as a suggestion and because they’re never seriously punished for violating it? Mandated reporting can’t be optional when it becomes inconvenient.

Until we trade “forgiveness” for accountability, this cycle will continue, with devastating consequences for the children least able to fight back.

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