[Vision2020] Suffer the Children

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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September 10, 2012
Suffer the Children By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

Just how flagrant does a pedophile need to be before the people around him
contact the police? Just how far beyond seeming to force himself on a boy
in a shower or loading up his laptop with photos of little girls’ crotches
does he have to go?

In the first instance I’m referring to Jerry Sandusky, whom Penn State
officials allowed to continue working with children even after they were
told that something was seriously amiss. In the second I’m referring to the
Rev. Shawn Ratigan, a Catholic priest in Missouri whose superiors acted no
less despicably.

In May 2010, the principal of a parochial school next door to the parish
where Father Ratigan served sent a memorandum to the Diocese of Kansas
City-St. Joseph, as Laurie Goodstein
reported<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/us/in-pedophile-case-church-failed-to-stop-priest.html?ref=lauriegoodstein>in
The Times. It flagged his odd behavior, including his habit of
instructing children to reach into his pockets for candy.

In December 2010, hundreds of troubling, furtively taken photographs were
found on his laptop, according to court testimony given too long after that
fact. One showed a toddler’s genitals.

In what jail or prison cell, you might ask, did Father Ratigan spend the
first half of 2011? None.

After the photos were discovered, he attempted suicide, received counseling
and was reassigned by Bishop Robert W. Finn, the head of the diocese, to a
new post as a chaplain to an order of nuns. There he was allowed to
celebrate Mass for youth groups and host an Easter egg hunt, and he was
caught taking a photograph under the table, up the skirt of the daughter of
parishioners who had invited him into their home.

In May 2011, a diocesan official finally told police about the extent of
Father Ratigan’s cache of child pornography. He was convicted of possession
of it in August 2011. And last week Bishop Finn was convicted of failing to
report him to law enforcement authorities, and got two years of
probation.<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/us/kansas-city-bishop-convicted-of-shielding-pedophile-priest.html?hp>

He’s the first American bishop to be found criminally culpable for his
inaction in the face of suspected child abuse. It was a long time coming.
Over the last quarter-century there have been hundreds upon hundreds of
cases of molestation by Catholic priests. And one of the galling leitmotifs
of this crisis, which was the subject of a 1993 book that a colleague and I
wrote, has been church leaders’ refusal to treat priests as criminals
rather than abashed penitents and to let them be prosecuted in ways that
might keep them away from kids.

But I’m less interested in the grim milestone of Bishop Finn’s conviction
than in the crucial lessons his story reiterates.

One is that institutions have a potent impulse to avoid public scandal, and
do an execrable job of policing themselves. To protect their reputations or
simply to avoid conflict, they minimize even the most destructive behavior.
They convince themselves that they can handle it on their own. And they
persuade themselves that their mission, be it the inculcation of religious
faith or the scoring of touchdowns, trumps the law’s mandates.

Another is that for all the lip service that we pay to the preciousness of
children and the importance of their futures, they remain the most
voiceless members of our society. Many don’t know or understand what their
rights are; many don’t have the maturity or mettle to exercise them. They
depend on the vigilance and good faith of adults, which is to say they
depend, all too often, on a fiction.

And a third is that we’re as likely to turn away from sexual pathology as
confront it. It confounds and discomfits us.

These problems transcend the Catholic Church. Penn State is in part the
parable of an institution that didn’t want to be distracted or humiliated
and traded away the welfare of children, a shortsighted calculation with
long-term wreckage.

The Boy Scouts of America covered up sexual abuse in its ranks. A recent
Los Angeles Times
review<http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-boyscouts-20120805-m,0,5822319.story>of
files dating from 1970 to 1991 identified more than 125 cases of
alleged
molestation by men whom the organization had previously had reason to
suspect of abusive behavior. “In some cases,” The Times noted, “officials
failed to document reports of abuse in the first place.” In others, it
failed to involve the police.

Over the last two decades the Catholic Church has spelled out stricter
policies, including the prompt notification of law enforcement officials.
And its defenders have complained that newly revealed instances of
wrongdoing are usually old cases that predated better awareness of child
sexual abuse, better education about it and a toughened resolve.

But the case of Father Ratigan postdates all of that — by many, many years.
It suggests the tenacity of willful ignorance and deliberate evasion, even
when the price is nothing less than the ravaged psyches of vulnerable
children.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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