Leaders of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville were aware of sexual abuse allegations as long ago as the late 1980s against a priest now said to be sequestered on the campus, and a psychiatric evaluation of the Rev. Richard Eckroth led to recommending that he not have unsupervised contact with children.

Those revelations were revealed in a pair of published reports in Minnesota newspapers Tuesday, and continue a steady stream of reports raising questions about how the abbey has handled charges of sexual abuse against the religious leaders living and working there.

The St. Cloud Times reported Tuesday that a previously court-sealed evaluation of Eckroth -- conducted over three months in the early 1990s -- recommended to abbey leaders that he no longer have contact with children unless he was observed.

The newspaper said the documents -- sealed as part of a court related to a 1993 lawsuit by two men who accused Eckroth of molesting them when they were boys -- were sought by attorneys representing the two men, but only part of them were made available to the plaintiff in the case.

The newspaper said its reporters saw copies of the documents prepared by St. Luke's Institute in Maryland, renowned as a treatment center for clergy accused of sexual abuse. Eckroth was evaluated by the center's psychiatrists, but the results weren't fully released in that case.

During the evaluation, Eckroth admitted being naked with naked boys in a sauna at a cabin near Bemidji that is owned by St. John's and is the locale at which several other people say they were abused by St. John's priests, mainly in the 1970s.

Eckroth has maintained his innocence to the accusations.

Eckroth, 75, is restricted on St. John's grounds, along with 11 monks who have admitted to sexual misdeeds, St. John's Abbot John Klassen has said. Klassen has agreed to open the personnel files of the sequestered priests to local police investigators seeking background connected to a pair of high profile area criminal cases involving children.

Physical, psychiatric, neuropsychological, psychological and spiritual assessments were completed as a part of the St. Luke's evaluation.

Evaluators said the allegations were "quite credible" and that "there is substantial evidence that Father Eckroth has been sexually inappropriate with minors."

It's unclear if the abbey-imposed restriction of movements came after the abbey received that report or later.

The Star Tribune also reported about Eckroth Monday, saying that after receipt of the St. Luke's evaluation, St. John's officials allowed Eckroth to travel unaccompanied to the abbey's mission in the Bahamas, and later supervised construction of a new church in Bimini.

The newspaper also reported that Eckroth was able to continue to visit the cabin outside Bemidji

While Tuesday's reports focused on Eckroth, Stearns County investigators continued background investigations on all 11 priests sequestered at the abbey using the opened personnel files.

The cases that have drawn the attention of sheriff's detectives are the stabbing deaths of two teenage sisters from St. Cloud in September 1974. The bodies of Mary Reker, 15, and her 12-year-old sister Susanne were found west of St. Cloud stabbed to death. A St. John's priest passed a polygraph test in the case he took in the early 1990s, and denies any involvement in the killings, according to Klassen. The other is the high-profile disappearance of Jacob Wetterling, who disappeared outside St. Joseph in a case that became widely known and around which child protection advocates rallied.

Compiled by Parker Hodges, Staff Writer