Waiting for Godot to Leave

What on earth is wrong with our bishops?   As bad as I thought Bishop Finn handled the Fr. Ratigan case , I had no idea that he ignored the red flags described in this letter alone.  The letter was written in 2010 by Julie Hess, the principal of the Catholic school at the parish where Fr. Ratigan was pastor, and delivered to Finn's Vicar General, his second-in-command. All you need to keep in mind while reading it is that Fr. Ratigan was later discovered to have been busy taking pornographic photographs of the little girls of his parish (one as young as age two), was molesting them, and has since been sentenced to 50 years in Federal prison without the possibility of parole. How did Fr. Ratigan's ordinary react to this letter and to the unfolding of this horrific case? Bishop Finn utterly and totally ignored this letter .  As far as I know, he never even acknowledged receiving it until more than a year later, after the story broke, when he claimed he finally "r...

Fr. Shawn Ratigan Fr. Shawn Ratigan has been sentenced to 50 years in Federal prison without the possibility of parole for molesting and taking explicit photographs of girls as young as age 2. You can read about it here - but the Kansas City Star goes into some detail about the nature of the crimes, and it's not easy to stomach. At the time the story broke, when it was revealed that Ratigan's bishop, Robert Finn, mishandled the case and showed a flagrant disregard for the victims and their families, Bill Donohue of the Catholic Defense League downplayed Ratigan's crimes and asserted that no child pornography was involved.  The priest was just a shutter bug who liked to take photos of young girls and their crotches, or so Donohue implied. In the perfect world, Bill Donohue would read the Star's description of the photos Ratigan took and the physical contact he had with his helpless victims and would issue a heart-felt apology for the shameful way he spun the s...

Today, I spent lunch with my friend and Theater of the Word actor Dave Treadway of Steward Media  and I was on a tear, complaining about many things, especially this.  "Dave," I said, "I used to think the liberals in the Church caused all the trouble, until I met the conservatives in the Church.  Now I'm getting used to rampant hypocrisy on both sides of the spectrum, from left to right - Catholics who are as bad as I am and worse, regardless of the number of devotions or novenas they pray.  I am hurt by, but used to, leftist Catholics who ignore Church teaching and right-wing Catholics who despise the Catechism.  I am used to, but hurt by, bad liberal bishops and bad conservative bishops.  I am used to, but hurt by, my own infernal sinfulness, which keeps rearing its ugly head again and again. "But what really bothers me at a fundamental level is how many conservative Catholics there are who are making excuses for rape and child abuse...

Father Z. has written a rather lame post in defense of Kansas City Bishop Finn , (more accurately, a post attacking Finn's critics).  Bishop Finn, for those who haven't been following, enabled a child pornographer priest to continue to victimize children by taking pornographic pictures of them, refused to call police, helped destroy evidence in the case, and spent $1.4 million of money from Catholic Schools and Parishes to defend himself from related misdemeanor charges that carried no serious chance of jail time and no real financial fines.   Read my many posts in which I go into detail on this .  Or read the facts of the case, unfiltered by the "liberal anti-Catholic media" (which, apparently, includes orthodox pro-life anti-contraception anti-Obama Catholics like me) - read the documented facts of the case  here or here . Mistaken as Fr. Z's post is, it gets worse: Father Z. is censoring out commenters who disagree with him...