UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Several more pieces of valuable commentary on the story of Bishop Robert Finn in Kansas City and his conviction last week on charges of having failed to report Father Shawn Ratigan after Finn learned Ratigan had pornographic images of children on his computer:
At Commonweal, Grant Gallicho does excellent work summarizing the Finn case and rebutting the shameful argument of Dr. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League that Finn is innocent (!) and that the Ratigan case does not involve child abuse (!). Gallicho’s posting is long and detailed, and it’s difficult for me to point to a single section that encapsulates the argument. I encourage readers to read the entire piece, just as I also encourage you to refresh your memory of the specifics of the Finn-Ratigan case by clicking on the detailed timeline in Joshua McElwee’s NCR article about the Finn conviction (which Pam Cohen may have compiled and for which she deserves great credit, if that’s the case). And I recommend Laurie Goodstein’s recent summary of the details of the case in New York Times.
Though it’s hard to abstract Gallicho’s extensive and well-argued posting, here’s one excerpt that encapsulates his argument:
But what is he [i.e., Dr. Donohue] thinking when he calls the “condemnations targeting Finn…as unfair as they are contrived”? The man is guilty of not reporting suspected child abuse. He was informed of Ratigan’s disturbing photos of children (children, not teenagers) on December 16, 2010. There is nothing contrived or unfair about condemning his failure to respond adequately to the threat posed by Ratigan. He chose not to forward the case to his own sexual-abuse review board, and to take as gospel the evaluation of one psychiatrist even though his closest advisers were urging him to send Ratigan to another shrink. And when Finn learned Ratigan was not abiding even the light restrictions the bishop had placed on him, what did he do? He gave him a stern talking-to. What would have happened if Msgr. Murphy hadn’t made the decision to tell Capt. Smith the whole truth? We know what Ratigan did in the meantime. He kept looking at God-knows-what online. He heard kids’ confessions. He had parties for kids and their parents, where he apparently continued his work as an amateur pornographer. Because the bishop failed.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.