the rix mix

Judge refuses to drop charges against U.S. Catholic bishop


(Reuters) - 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.

Finn's defense sums up why we detest these men. With divorce, birth control, abortion, LGBT rights, Catholic moral law takes precedence over civil law. The Church has its own rules. But charged with failure to report to police child pornography found on a priest's computer, this is what Finn claimed:

Missouri statutes requiring clergy, school teachers and others to report suspected child sexual abuse were "vague."

also, Bishop Finn

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.

The judge tossed out those grounds for dismissal. Finn was trying to claim that  weak civil law took precedence over his Christian moral obligations.   I suppose Finn believes only  God & The Pope have the power to punish him.

Except for a few isolated, courageous voices among the Bishops, here & recently in Ireland, these clerical executives seem to have little or no sense of the evilness they have permitted & covered up.  It reaches all  the way to  Pope Benedict XVI. Why is that so?  Why are  they not  grief-stricken & shamed? Why are they not engaging in extreme expressions  of atonement? These morally corrupt Bishops should be crawling on bloody knees & hands to Shrines of the Blessed Virgin,  resign their offices, & retire to austere & silent cloistered monasteries, never to show their faces again.

Lawsuits by victims of perverted priests have emptied the coffers of Archdioceses & in some places bankrupted them. Hundreds of schools & parish churches are closed. Some deserve to be shut down, but in no instances does the  Church admit it is due to the cost of pedophile priests.  But laity connects the dots. Only ultra-conservative Catholics, like those represented by Rick Santorum,  defend the Bishops. They want to return the Church to the era before Pope John XXIII & Vatican reforms.*  For them, if Father O'Malley in Going My Way was raping altar boys, just quietly transfer the Singing Priest from St. Dominic's to St. Mary's, & if Ingrid Bergman notices, she's just a nun, she can be sent to Borneo.

*Some Catholic conservatives  blame Vatican II reforms for the child abuse.  But systemic abuse in Ireland - including what amounted to child slavery - has been traced back long before Vatican II.  The Church hierarchy longs for the days when it operated in secrecy, was immune from civil law, & it was almost unheard of for laity to criticize or question priests, who were dictators in their realms.

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