Depraved Moral Authority
by digby
What a horrible story to wake up to:
On the surface, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan was just the kind of dynamic new priest that any Roman Catholic bishop would have been happy to put in a parish. He rode a motorcycle, organized summer mission trips to Guatemala and joined Bishop Robert W. Finn and dozens of students on a bus trek to Washington for the “March for Life,” a big annual anti-abortion rally.
But in December 2010, Bishop Finn got some disturbing news: Father Ratigan had just tried to commit suicide by running his motorcycle in a closed garage. The day before, a computer technician had discovered sexually explicit photographs of young girls on Father Ratigan’s laptop, including one of a toddler with her diaper pulled away to expose her genitals.
The decisions that Bishop Finn and his second-in-command in the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Msgr. Robert Murphy, made about Father Ratigan over the next five months ultimately led to the conviction of the bishop in circuit court on Thursday on one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse. It was the first time a Catholic bishop in the United States had been held accountable in criminal court in the nearly three decades since the priest sexual abuse scandals first came to light.
Look at those three paragraphs. The depraved irony of some pedophile organizing a student “march for life” is too much to bear. In the next paragraph we find out that the priest was molesting babies, which makes his anti-abortion stance even more depraved. And then finally we find out that the church authority covered it up, which is even more depraved.
I just don’t know what to say about this anymore. Whenever I see the Catholic Church hierarchy strong arming the government and issuing moral edicts, I just want to scream.
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