VATICAN CITY
The Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
The Vatican’s investigation of an American bishop could lead the way to real accountability for predatory priests, or could be business as usual for the troubled church.
VATICAN CITY — Father Shawn Ratigan of Independence, Missouri, liked to take pictures of naked little girls. He especially liked little girls between the ages of two and 12. He liked to make them pose for him—sometimes completely nude, sometimes sprawled out on the grass of the fenced-in parish lawn, and sometimes he made them pull their panties away from their buttocks and vaginas so he could get a better view. Sometimes he stole pictures in what authorities would call “up-skirt” covert images of little girls’ crotches from under tables or in the nearby Catholic school playground. He used a digital camera or his cell phone, downloading hundreds if not thousands of the pedo-pornographic pictures onto his laptop.
Ratigan would probably still be producing child pornography if a computer technician named Ken Kes hadn’t found the disturbing images on the priest’s computer in 2009 when the Kansas City diocese called him to repair the sluggish machine. According to a Reuters report outlining the priest’s sins, Kes found the “odd images” when he was fixing the priest’s laptop.
Kes returned the computer to the administrator at the Kansas City diocese, which was, and still is, under the direction of Bishop Robert Finn. “I looked at the first one. It was a young girl climbing up the back of a pickup truck and I thought, huh, that’s kind of a neat shot,” Kes testified in court. “The next one that I clicked on was a girl climbing out of swimming pool and all it showed was her rear end. Then there was a little girl on the grass with her legs spread. All you could see was the area from her belly button to her knees. I stopped looking right there and got on the phone.”
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