Who has time to monitor pedophiles when women are out there using birth control?
by digby
"Disturbing pictures":
A Catholic bishop in Kansas City must stand trial on charges that he failed to report a priest found with pornographic pictures of young girls on his Church computer to police, a judge said on Thursday.
Bishop Robert Finn, head of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, faces one misdemeanor charge that he failed to tell authorities that Church officials had found disturbing pictures of unclothed little girls that appeared to have been taken by a popular local priest, Father Patrick Ratigan.
His trial is set to start September 24.
Finn's lawyers had asked that the case against him be dismissed and argued in a hearing last week that Missouri statutes requiring clergy, school teachers and others to report suspected child sexual abuse were "vague."
They also argued that even if the bishop suspected abuse he had no duty to report the situation to authorities, because he was not the "designated reporter" within the diocese and could rely on someone else within the diocese to notify authorities
Ok, so it was a long time ago, before the Church was fully aware of its systemic issues with child molestation.
Except it wasn't:
In Finn's case, Church officials discovered the photos on Ratigan's computer in December 2010 and spent months analyzing whether or not they should turn him in.
When Church officials initially confronted Ratigan, he tried to kill himself. But he survived and was ultimately sent by Bishop Finn for psychological assessment and ordered to stay away from children.
Police were not notified until another Church official called them in May 2011. Ratigan is now in jail awaiting trial on 13 counts of child pornography.
Victims' parents allege he continued to take pornographic pictures of young girls connected to the diocese until shortly before his arrest, and many blame Bishop Finn for not notifying parents and the police.
Well, to be fair, I'm sure they were very busy protecting their religious liberty. Adult women everywhere were trying to control their reproduction and blastocysts needed their protection so they probably didn't have time to ensure that actual children weren't being molested.
Keep in mind the latest position by the Catholic bishops on this issue:
Cardinal Dolan criticized a legislative proposal that would, for a year, drop the statute of limitations for filing civil claims for sexual offenses, allowing for lawsuits by people who say they were abused long ago. The cardinal said he was concerned that a flood of lawsuits over abuse by priests could drain the church of money it is using for charitable purposes.
“I think we bishops have been very contrite in admitting that the church did not handle this well at all in the past,” he said. “But we bristle sometimes in that the church doesn’t get the credit, now being in the vanguard of reform. It does bother us that the church continues to be a whipping boy.”
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