Bishop Finn’s Story in Broader Context: John Paul II and the Demise of Pastoral Bishops
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U.S. Roman Catholics outraged over child sex abuse scandal; call for bishop’s resignation
Calls for Bishop Robert Finn’s resignation intensified the day after he became the highest-ranking U.S. church official to be convicted of a crime related to a child sexual abuse scandal.
Soon after a Missouri judge found Bishop Finn guilty Thursday of one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child sexual abuse to the state, unhappy Roman Catholics began discussing ways to get the bishop out of office on a Facebook page titled “Bishop Finn Must Go.”
Among the posts was one that listed contact information for the Vatican and urged parishioners to voice their displeasure with Bishop Finn at the highest levels. Pope Benedict XVI alone has authority over bishops. Through the decades-long abuse scandal, only one U.S. bishop has stepped down over his failures to stop abusive clergy: Cardinal Bernard Law – who, in 2002, resigned as head of the Archdiocese of Boston.
Jackson County Judge John M. Torrence sentenced Bishop Finn to two years of supervised probation. If the bishop abides by a set of stipulations from the judge, the conviction will be wiped from his record in 2014.
“Now that our justice system says he’s guilty, he has lost his ability to lead our diocese,” Patricia Rotert, a Catholic church member in Kansas City, said Friday. “He’s lost his credibility. There is turmoil and angst around him and I don’t think he can bring people together.”
Bishop Finn’s attorneys would not comment on the bishop’s future in the church, saying it was a legal matter.
However, Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph spokesman Jack Smith indicated that Bishop Finn wasn’t going anywhere.
“The bishop looks forward to continuing to perform his duties, including carrying out the important obligations placed on him by the court,” Mr. Smith said in an emailed statement Friday.
Bishop Finn’s conviction comes four years after the church paid $10 million to settle 47 pending sexual abuse claims against the diocese and 12 of its priests. When announcing that deal in 2008, Bishop Finn apologized for the abuse that occurred at the hands of current and former clergy members, and promised that steps were being taken to make sure such abuse never happened again.
The diocese posted an update about the 2008 settlement on its website in June 2011 stating that Bishop Finn had written 118 letters of apology to plaintiffs or their families. That same month, Bishop Finn apologized for not responding to warnings the diocese received a year earlier from a parish principal detailing suspicious behavior by the Reverand Shawn Ratigan around children.
Instead of reading the memo and looking into the claims, Bishop Finn left it up to subordinates to handle the matter. He later admitted it was a year before he finally read a five-page document that a parish elementary school principal wrote detailing suspicious activities by Rev. Ratigan around children.
Bishop Finn also was informed of nude photos of children found on Rev. Ratigan’s laptop computer in December 2010, but instead of turning them over to police, Bishop Finn sent Rev. Ratigan to live at a convent in Independence, Mo.
Monsignor Robert Murphy turned the photos over to police in May 2011 — against Bishop Finn’s wishes, according to court documents — after Rev. Ratigan continued to violate Bishop Finn’s orders to stay away from children and not take any pictures of them.
Rev. Ratigan pleaded guilty last month to five child pornography counts, but hasn’t been sentenced. Prosecutors have requested he spend the rest of his life in prison.
Bishop Finn apologized again Thursday in court for the pain caused by his failure to report Rev. Ratigan.
The bishop has avoided facing charges in Missouri’s Clay County, where Rev. Ratigan was charged, after reaching a settlement in November 2011. For five years, Bishop Finn must report to the Clay County prosecutor directly each month about any suspected child abuse in the diocese’s facilities in the county.
“I said for years that we wouldn’t be in the mess we were in today if about 30 bishops had said `I made a mistake, I’m sorry, I take full responsibility and I resign,“’ said the Reverand Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “I think we’re at a state in the life of the church when a bishop is convicted of a misdemeanor, found guilty of not doing what he was supposed to do, I think he should resign for the good of the diocese and the good of the church.”
Support for Bishop Finn’s resignation is far from unanimous. Some say they agree he made a mistake, but it’s not one that should force him out, especially with even more stringent safeguards in place to protect children.
“There’s always been fights in the church, and there will continue to be fights in the church,” said Kansas City parishioner Bruce Burkhart, a member of the Serra Club, which supports and promotes priests.
“I think people may walk away, but that’s their business,” he said. “If they think their children are any more safe in public schools, or in another church setting where people are working with youth, the data indicate they’re not. The Catholic Church in America is probably now today the safest place for children.”
While Bishop Finn is the highest-ranking Catholic official to be charged in the U.S. with shielding an abusive priest, Albany Law School professor Timothy Lytton said the June conviction of Monsignor William Lynn in Philadelphia broke the ice on criminal convictions against members of the Catholic hierarchy.
Monsignor Lynn, who supervised other clergy as an aide to the cardinal, was convicted of felony child endangerment and became the first U.S. church official sent to prison for his handling of abuse complaints. He is appealing his three- to six-year sentence.
Still, Bishop Finn’s conviction is significant because it proves Monsignor Lynn’s criminal prosecution was not an isolated event, but instead something that is likely to embolden prosecutors to go after church leaders who fail to protect children.
“Kansas City might mark a trend,” Mr. Lytton said. “It’s no longer good enough to just file civil suits; criminal justice may be much quicker to get involved. Kansas City normalizes this kind of reaction to the scandal.”
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Bishop Finn found guilty of one of two counts of failure to report suspected child abuse
BREAKING NEWS!
A Jackson County judge found Bishop Robert Finn guilty on Thursday on one count of failing to report suspected child abuse. He was found not guilty on the other count. The state asked the judge to put Finn on probation, according to court reports.
A judge granted the state’s request for court-supervised probation. The conditions include mandated reporter training, institute training for clergy and a $10,000 fund for victims of abuse.
After the verdict was read, Finn spoke to the court, saying he regretted what happened and was sorry for the hurt the events caused, according to court reports.
After the ruling, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker dropped all charges against the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph.
Finn was charged with the misdemeanors for not reporting suspected child abuse from Dec. 2012 to May 2011 in connection with allegations against Rev. Shawn Ratigan.
Ratigan pleaded guilty to four counts of producing child pornography and one count of attempting to produce child pornography in August.
According to court documents, after being informed of pornographic photographs of young girls found on Ratigan’s computer, Finn sent the priest to a hospital for psychiatric care instead of reporting him to authorities.
The diocese didn’t turn over evidence to law enforcement until May 2011, after Finn found out Ratigan had violated orders to stay away from children.
Read the full indictment: http://bit.ly/T55GnS
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Catholic priest donated $1000 to gay ‘marriage,’ diocese mum
A Catholic priest’s donation to support redefining marriage in Minnesota has been revealed, deepening a rift between a conservative Catholic hierarchy and more liberal subordinates in the blue state over gay ‘marriage.’
The Duluth News Tribune reported Sunday that Rev. Peter Lambert of St. Louis Catholic Church in Floodwood had donated $1,000 to Minnesotans United for Families, the group fighting a constitutional marriage amendment, in March.
The Diocese of Duluth, where Lambert is stationed, has donated $50,000 to support the traditional marriage amendment. Duluth Diocese spokesman Kyle Eller told the Tribune that Lambert didn’t intend the donation to be a public statement.
“It was my understanding that Father Lambert wasn’t aware that the contribution would be made public, and it wasn’t intended to be a public statement,” said Eller, who declined further comment.
The diocese didn’t immediately respond to an email from LifeSiteNews.com requesting comment Tuesday.
The bishops in Minnesota have ranked among the most outspoken Catholic defenders of traditional marriage in the country in recent years. In 2010, the prelates backed a comprehensive six-week campaign to re-catechize their flock on the Church’s moral teaching on marriage and sexuality.
In January, Archbishop John Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis emphasized to clergy under his purview, which includes the Duluth diocese, the importance of their adherence to Church doctrine on the marriage question.
“The gravity of this struggle, and the radical consequences of inaction propels me to place a solemn charge upon you all,” he said. “On your ordination day, you made a promise to promote and defend all that the Church teaches. I call upon that promise in this effort to defend marriage. There ought not be open dissension on this issue.”
Nienstedt again urged the Catholic faithful this Sunday to support the proposed marriage amendment that will appear on the general election ballot this November.
Supporters of redefining marriage have meanwhile been targeting Catholics with their own message.
An openly homosexual religious priest from St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. told a crowd of 200 in June that Catholics are permitted to vote against the amendment as a matter of freedom of conscience.
“I believe this amendment violates an important principle of Catholic teaching, and that as Catholics, we can vote no,” Rev. Bob Pearson said.
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Catholic bishop says church’s credibility on sexual abuse is ‘shredded’
The U.S. Catholic bishops’ point man on sexual abuse has said that the hierarchy’s credibility on fixing the problem is “shredded” and that the situation is comparable to the Reformation, when “the episcopacy, the regular clergy, even the papacy were discredited.”
Bishop R. Daniel Conlon of Joliet, Ill., last month told a conference of staffers who oversee child safety programs in American dioceses that he had always assumed that consistently implementing the bishops’ policies on child protection, “coupled with some decent publicity, would turn public opinion around.”
“I now know this was an illusion,” Conlon, chairman of the bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, said in an address on Aug. 13 to the National Safe Environment and Victim Assistance Coordinators Leadership Conference in Omaha, Neb.
His talk was published in the Aug. 30 edition of Origins, an affiliate of Catholic News Service.
Conlon said that the conviction of a high-ranking church official in Philadelphia for covering up clergy abuse and the upcoming trial of a bishop in Missouri on charges of failing to report a priest on suspicions of child abuse have contributed to a widespread impression that the bishops “have failed to keep their commitments.”
The bishop disputed that view, but said even close friends “turned almost hostile” over dinner recently when he said the hierarchy has adopted “an entirely different spirit of openness and accountability.”
Conlon told the conference that the bishops still needed to clarify emerging questions about how to deal with issues like child pornography and “boundary violations” in which church personnel might engage in inappropriate interactions with children that don’t yet cross the line into physical abuse.
But he said that the bottom line is that the bishops “are gravely weakened and in need of assistance” in developing policies and changing public perceptions. He told the child safety workers to think of themselves “as an extension of your bishop.”
“Our credibility on the subject of child abuse is shredded,” Conlon said. “You may have a better chance. People — in the church, outside the church, and hanging on the edge — need to know that real progress is being made.”
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