Bishop Finn and Cardinal Danneels: two different responses to abuse ‘cover-ups’

For some time, observers have expected the final outcome for Bishop Robert Finn, former head of the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese, who was ordered by Vatican officials to tender his resignation last month. The predictable sides have lined up: either condemning and saying, ‘It’s about time,’ or defending him. With all the noise made, it may be difficult for most readers to tease out the truth, but an examination of the facts of the Finn case and that of another high-profile prelate may be enlightening.

With Finn’s 2012 conviction of the misdemeanor offence of “failure to report” a priest caught with images of children on his computer, some of which were judged to be pornographic, it has been expected by supporters and enemies alike that the bishop would be asked by Rome to step down. But while the mainstream secular and liberal Catholic press are triumphing, some very pertinent questions are being left unanswered, primary among which is, if Finn, why not others? All the others…all the many, many others?

Bishop Finn was removed from his diocese and is now being almost universally reviled as a “criminal” and a shielder of sex-abuse. But he never covered up molestation of young people by a priest, and has never been charged with that.

At the same time, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, after being shown to have personally covered for a man who for years had sexually assaulted his own nephew, has been allowed to retire honourably at the normal retirement age, from his position as the enormously powerful head of the archdiocese of Brussels, Belgium. Last year, Danneels was personally invited by Pope Francis to consult at the Synod of Bishops on the Family.

To put it bluntly, Finn never shielded a priest-abuser; Danneels did, for years. But Finn’s out and Danneels is invited to important conferences by the pope.

Phil Lawler, an editor of the popular website CatholicCulture.org, has strongly supported Finn’s resignation, but he raises the burning question, “Why Finn and no one else?” The “truly remarkable thing” about the case, he says, is not that Finn was forced out, but that, in over a decade of egregious scandals around the world, he has been the only one.

“Dozens of other bishops were as negligent, or worse. But they remained in office for years as the Church hierarchy came, ever so slowly, to the conclusion that even prelates must be held accountable,” Lawler said.

A few are calling foul and saying that Finn has been singled out for punishment, not for having failed to report in a timely manner that one of his priests was taking photos of partly nude children, but because he dared to oppose a deeply entrenched progressivist establishment of the US Catholic machine, and attempted to restore a more traditional Catholic ethos in morals, liturgy and, perhaps most important, in his pursuit of more orthodox vocations to the priesthood.

They are saying, in other words, that Finn’s downfall was in reality a manifestation of the never-ending turf war in US Church politics between the so-called “progressive” heterodox left and the forces attempting to restore orthodoxy.

The legal charge against Bishop Finn was that he and his officials delayed reporting the activities of Fr. Shawn Ratigan to authorities in a timely manner, that he and his subordinates did not follow the diocese’s protocols promptly enough. But the case is far from cut and dried. Indeed, at the time of the indictment, attorney Michael Quinlan wrote for EWTN that a “careful review” of the facts of the case show that the charge against Finn should never have been laid.

“The prosecutor’s overzealous misuse of that law in these circumstances violates constitutional due process protections and denies rights to fundamental fairness,” Quinlan wrote.

“Media and victims advocate groups have likened the diocese’s delay in notifying authorities to the inexcusable conduct of bishops in the U.S. and Europe, who for years and sometimes decades covered up known sexual abuse of minors by priests under their control and even assigned and reassigned these men to stations where they could continue their predation,” Quinlan continued.

“The facts, however, as found by an independent investigation, do not support this comparison. Nor do they support the criminal charge against Bishop Finn.”

Nevertheless, in December 2012, a court found Finn guilty of one misdemeanor charge and not guilty of a second charge of failing to report Ratigan’s activities. He was sentenced to two years of probation. Bishop Finn’s fatal “error,” according to an independent legal investigator, was trusting his Vicar General, Msgr. Robert Murphy, to follow diocesan protocols, and Fr. Ratigan himself when the latter promised to abide by the restrictions.

The day after Ratigan’s computer was turned over to the diocese, the priest attempted suicide and was hospitalized. It was in response to the priest’s attempted suicide that Finn ordered a psychiatric evaluation, not, as it is being portrayed in the media, as an attempt to minimize or excuse Ratigan’s behaviour. That evaluation found that Ratigan was depressed but was not a pedophile. Nonetheless, Finn ordered that Ratigan must have no further contact with children, must not use a computer without supervision and must not take any photos of children. Finn removed the priest from his regular ministry and sent him to live as a chaplain at a convent of nuns.

According to court documents, “within months of entering into the agreement,” Ratigan had violated these restrictions, buying and using a computer, using social media and attending a children’s party. At that point, in May 2011, the diocese reported the violation to police, five months after the laptop was turned over to Msgr. Murphy. Ratigan was arrested on May 18.

A search of his computer revealed hundreds of images of children, only a small number of which were deemed pornographic. These led to 13 separate counts of the charge of creating child pornography. The court documents show that Ratigan later pleaded guilty to four counts of production of child pornography and one count of attempted production of child pornography. Ratigan, ordained by Finn’s predecessor, Bishop Raymond Boland, was laicized by Finn and was sentenced by the court to a total of 50 years imprisonment.

According to an independent report, when he received the priest’s laptop, Msgr. Murphy informed the police officer, Capt. Rick Smith, who served as a consultant and police liaison for the diocese on sexual abuse, as well as an attorney for the diocese. To these, Murphy only described “in neutral terms” a single image from the computer, asking if it could be considered pornographic. Both of the men independently said it was probably not pornographic. Murphy reported to Finn that the situation had been dealt with according to the diocesan protocols. Finn himself never looked at the photos.

The report’s author, Todd Graves, an attorney and former national co-chairman of the U.S. Justice Department’s Child Exploitation Working Group, said:

Msgr. Murphy conducted a limited and improperly conceived investigation which focused on whether a specific image on Fr. Ratigan’s laptop, which held hundreds of troubling images, met the definition of ‘child pornography.’ Before he had viewed the images, Msgr. Murphy solicited an opinion from an IRB member, [police] Capt. Rick Smith but merely described one photograph over the telephone in a neutral manner. Msgr. Murphy also shared the images with diocesan counsel and received an opinion that a single disturbing image did not constitute child pornography.

Rather than referring the matter to the IRB [as a whole] for a more searching review, Msgr. Murphy allowed two technical answers to his limited questions to satisfy the diocese’s duty of diligent inquiry. Relying on these responses, he failed to timely turn over the laptop to the police.

Although Bishop Finn was unaware of some important facts learned by Msgr. Murphy, or that police had never actually seen the pictures, the bishop erred in trusting Fr. Ratigan to abide by restrictions the bishop had placed on his interaction with children after the discovery of the laptop and Fr. Ratigan’s attempted suicide. The progressive Catholic machine triumphant

At the National Catholic Reporter, the Kansas City-based flagship of the radical progressivists in the US Church, Michael Sean Winters has all but admitted that Finn’s departure was the result of a campaign by a cohort of progressives. NCR clashed with Finn for years, and the bishop insisted the paper should cease identifying itself as Catholic.

Winters wrote of Finn’s departure: “The people of that diocese, whose numbers have shrunk by one quarter since Bishop Finn took the reins of the diocese in 2005, can now begin healing the wounds his leadership caused and, by the grace of God, rebuilding the once-vibrant local church.”

Winters reveals much when he writes about Finn’s “authoritarian manner” in running the diocese and his “fatal flaw” of “hubris.”

“When Finn took the reins in Kansas City,” Winters writes, “he began sacking longtime staff, shut down offices he did not like, and vowed to increase vocations,” meaning vocations to the priesthood – a promise the bishop made good on, with 7 being ordained this year alone.

Winters continues, “Kansas City had a long tradition of lay involvement in the workings of the diocese, dating back before the Second Vatican Council and its emphasis on the priesthood of the baptized. That tradition was ignored. Lines were drawn between the culture of the Church and the ambient culture.” The culture, in other words, that trumpets radical feminism, homosexuality, abortion, contraception and longs for a Catholic Church emasculated and guided by the secularist agenda.

Clearly, Finn’s “flaw of hubris” was mainly that he was interested in restoring traditional concepts, like the priesthood of the ordained and a moral order in accordance with the Natural Law, to Kansas City that until 2005 had long been firmly and comfortably in the hands of post-Vatican II, 60s’ radicals. Finn’s rejection of the “ambient culture,” particularly of the acceptance of abortion, contraception and homosexuality, was the real sticking point for the NCR crowd.

The animus between Finn and NCR, and their followers in the greying liberal US Catholic establishment, goes back to his earliest days as bishop. In 2006, NCR’s Dennis Coday lamented the “wrenching” “transition from a church focused on social engagement and lay empowerment to one more concerned with Catholic identity and evangelization,” under Finn’s tenure.

“Finn has brought the diocese, for decades a model of the former category of church practice, to a screeching halt and sent it veering off in a new direction, leaving nationally heralded education programs and high-profile lay leaders and women religious with long experience abandoned and dismayed,” Coday wrote.

While NCR and their cadre continued to play the aggrieved victims, it was clear they did not speak for all Catholics of Kansas City. In a 2013 column in his diocesan newspaper, the bishop called NCR out for its decades of opposing Catholic teaching, especially on sexual morality.

Finn said that from his first days, he had been “deluged” with complaints from the faithful about the Kansas-based NCR’s “insistent undermining” of Catholic teaching on female ordination, homosexuality, contraception and abortion and “lionizing dissident theologies while rejecting Magisterial teaching.”

Meanwhile, the Finn case can be compared with that of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, formerly of Brussels, who is among the many bishops in the Catholic Church who have been either formally investigated or credibly accused of covering up years and decades of sexual abuse, including serial rape, by priests and even fellow bishops.

For the decades following the Second Vatican Council, Danneels was the leader of the ascending liberal group of European bishops. As the darling of the liberal secular press of Europe, and as archbishop of Mechlin-Brussels, the home of the European Union and the center of much of Europe’s political life, Danneels wielded enormous power in European politics.

Indeed, former high-ranking Belgian politicians have just alleged that his political power and his dissent from Catholic moral teaching extended to petitioning Belgium’s King Baudouin to allow that country’s liberalizing abortion law to be passed in 1990.

Immediately following his retirement in 2010, Danneels, who has also publicly supported same-sex civil unions, was revealed to have actively worked to hide the activities of the now-notorious homosexual abuser, his friend and protégé Roger Vangheluwe, the former bishop of Bruges. Danneels was caught in a recording telling Vangheluwe’s victim, his nephew, “The bishop will resign next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait.”

The cardinal is heard in the recording warning the victim against trying to blackmail the church and urged him not to drag Vangheluwe’s name “through the mud.” Danneels added that the victim should admit his own guilt and ask forgiveness.

After Brussels police had raided the offices of the archdiocese and seized documents and computers as part of an investigation into what was suspected to be decades of cover-ups, Danneels was questioned in court for ten hours about his knowledge and involvement. Despite extensive evidence, no charges were laid against the cardinal.

The head of the Brussels’ Church’s own independent commission on cases of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal collusion, Peter Adriaenssens, told media that the cardinal’s name has appeared in 50 of the complaints made by victims before the commission. Adriaenssens said that Danneels was implicated not as an abuser himself, but as someone who knew of the abuse but did nothing to stop it. The police raid occurred just before the closing of the commission’s investigation, halting its progress. Questions remain about the outcome of the commission’s unpublished final findings.

John Allen asks the million-Euro question: Is Finn’s ousting part of a bigger movement?

The suspicion that Finn is the victim of an “ideological purge” was put forward recently not by conservatives but by John Allen, the former star of NCR, now associate editor of Crux, the Catholic news magazine of the Boston Globe. Shortly after the close of the 2014 Synod, Allen wrote of the possibility that Finn was one member of an “enemies list” held by Pope Francis, of those prominent prelates who would oppose a swing to the left in the Church.

These, Allen suggested, might include Finn; Paraguayan bishop Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, like Finn a member of Opus Dei; and Mario Oliveri of Albenga in northern Italy who, also like Finn, has been a strong supporter of the traditional, pre-Vatican II Latin Mass.

“Despite the different details, many observers can’t help noticing that all three prelates have one obvious thing in common: Each is among the most conservative members of their respective bishops’ conferences,” Allen wrote.

John Allen quoted veteran Italian Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti, who has spoken of a wider “witch hunt” directed at conservatives, calling it “an internal war … being waged in the name of the pope.”

“The suspicion is that what’s really going on isn’t so much a clean-up operation as an ideological purge,” Allen added. To date, he said, “there hasn’t been a high-profile case under Francis of a bishop being called on the carpet for any of the usual doctrinal offenses – tolerating violations of the liturgical rules,” but “conservatives,” that is those promoting greater orthodoxy in the Church, like Cardinals Raymond Burke and Mauro Piacenza, the former head of the Congregation for Clergy.

“Many on the Catholic right can’t help but suspect that the recent preponderance of conservatives who’ve found themselves under the gun isn’t an accident,” Allen continued. “Some perceive a through-the-looking-glass situation, in which upholding Catholic tradition is now perceived as a greater offense than rejecting it.”

Pope Francis needs to issue a clear statement of his intentions to clarify the speculation, Allen said.

“Otherwise, the risk is that a good chunk of the Church may conclude that if the pope sees them as the enemy, there’s no good reason they shouldn’t see him the same way.”

“How do you explain Mahoney,”

He’s no longer leading a diocese and never led one under this pope.

“Cupich, Gomez, Dolan, Wuerl, O’Malley, Lynch, Marx, Maradiaga, etc and their abilities to lead a diocese?”

I don’t explain it. I don’t have to.

“Bishop Finn stands head and shoulders over all the above.”

And yet he is the one who was charged with a crime - and his actions in that case have everything to do with how poorly he administered his diocese. He’s a basically good man, an orthodox bishop, but not a good leader, not a good administrator, and he completely ignored the advice of his own hand picked officials. That’s why his own hand picked - and in-house trained - chancellor threw Finn under the bus. Did you know that happened?

Why did Finn ignore the advice given to him by the fund raisers HE HIRED about delaying the start of a capital campaign? Do you know what happens if they end up 10, 15 or close to 20 million short of their goal? I do. Disaster!

Finn’s diocese lost 20,000 Catholics during his tenure. They didn’t die. They didn’t move to another diocese. They just disappeared. They essentially ceased being practicing Catholics.

It’s not that he was a bad man. It’s not that he was an unorthodox bishop. It’s that he simply had no idea of what to do. He hired some people who were incompetent (orthodox perhaps, but incompetent). He retained others who should have been fired and they were retained merely because they were his friends. If someone gets a lawsuit or two filed against you, he should be fired. Finn retained him. If he essentially steals from you (meaning stealing from the diocese), or uses the diocese for his own financial gain, he should be fired. Finn retained him. Finn did exactly the wrong thing in personnel matters repeatedly.

I had a discussion with one of his highest ranking officials four years ago, and I told him that a) the capital campaign was going to be in serious trouble, b) the diocese still had no plan for its parishioners after 5 years of Finn being in charge, and c) Finn might be a great liability down the road (this was in 2011 just after the Ratigan case broke; I didn’t live in the diocese and had nothing to lose). That official completely denied there were any problems. He was downright pollyannish about it. It was as if he was out of touch with reality. I guarantee you that official will be out of a job by the end of 2015 or whenever a new bishop is appointed.

Several people in that chancery are most likely now worried they will lose their jobs because their incompetence will be obvious to the next bishop. Archbishop Naumann, the apostolic administrator, has to know what’s what in the diocese because he has employees and associates who have “fled” the chancery of Kansas City, Missouri because of the chaos there under Finn. Have you kept up with the tumultuous changes in that diocese lately? Have you read about them online? Just since the Ratigan case broke, that diocese has lost two chancellors, two schools office administrators, two vicar generals, two directors from the catechetical institute, two directors of young adult ministry, the director of youth ministry, the director of marriage and family, the HR director, the head and associate head of stewardship, and a number of other people. Some of these people needed to go I am sure, but others were undoubtedly competent and left in disgust over Finn’s handling of things.

As soon as I heard about the Vatican investigation, I knew Finn was through. I remember reading in The Wanderer about Finn in 2006. I assumed - just as the author of the article suggested - that the attacks on Finn’s intelligence (his savvy, perhaps?) by liberals was just the standard sort of attack from liberals. After all don’t liberals attack the intelligence of conservatives all the time? But over the years I came to realize the liberals were right about Finn in at least one way: he just wasn’t that swift. I’m not saying he isn’t intelligent in an academic sense. I can’t even really say he has no street smarts at all. He just seems to make EXACTLY THE WRONG decision over and over again.

The one thing no one can take away from Bishop Robert Finn is that he dramatically increased the ranks of seminarians and new priests in his diocese. http://www.diocese-kcsj.org/_docs/2014_2015_Seminarian_Poster.pdf For that his parishioners should always be grateful.

“I have been wondering when someone was going to mention the Vicar General’s less than stellar performance.”

And he wasn’t the only one. What kind of bishop hears, “Hey, a school principal sent in this letter that says crazy things about Fr. Ratigan” and then DOES NOT ASK TO SEE THE LETTER??? Who does that? Seriously, if you’re a CEO of a corporation (let alone the bishop of a church), and one of your officials tells you he got a letter from a another official with accusations against yet another official wouldn’t you at least ask to see it? Think about it: there are only two possibilities in play there: 1) you have an official who is doing bizarre things and it requires your attention immediately, or 2) you have an official saying scandalously bizarre and untrue things about one of your officials and that warrants your immediate attention.

Finn said he never asked to see the letter. Who would do that? A very poor administrator of a diocese would.

“Can you make your story more consistent?”

There are no inconsistencies. The problem is yours.

“First you deride Bishop Finn with the statement:”

Nope. I stated a fact. The diocese has lost 20,000 Catholics in just a decade. Where did they go? Who was bishop then? What plan did he come up with to stop this? Finn did nothing. He was advised to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING. He did nothing.

“Yet later you state:”

Yet I state? Are you honestly saying I made an inconsistent statement by pointing out that the number of Catholics dropped over his tenure while the number of seminarians increased? The two are in themselves UNRELATED.

“I’d much rather have good, orthodox priests than weak “catholics” who “just disappear”. Once again, your “logic”, or lack thereof, eludes me.”

You’re the one who is not being logical. 1) you’re accusing me of inconsistency when I said nothing that was inconsistent. 2) you’re assuming that all of the new priests are orthodox. Don’t. Look up what happened to Fr. Jorge Ramirez. People assumed Ratigan was orthodox. In what he taught, he might have been, but not in how he lived. I know one of the new priests ordained by Finn to be a relative liberal compared to others. I had discussions with him before and after he was ordained. He was smart enough to never cross a certain line, but he’s still more liberal than others. 3) you’re making the mistake of assuming that all those who left were “weak ‘catholics’” when I know that not all were by any means. Did you know, for instance, that some of those most upset at Finn were real orthodox, conservative Catholics who felt betrayed by Finn’s stupid handling of the Ratigan case? That by the way included priests. Some of the most outspoken priests against Finn were some of those who were thought to be very orthodox. People openly discussed the fact that it was a handful of liberals among his clergy who came to his defense against some of the more orthodox conservative priests. I know a family that wrote a letter to Bishop Finn over how they were being treated by their parish priest. They preferred the Latin Mass, but were forced by circumstances to move to a different town and attend the local parish. The pastor there refused to allow them to kneel to receive the Eucharist and mocked the girls for wearing veils at Mass. When the family appealed to Finn for support, he ripped them to shreds in his response letter. A family member in another state informed me about the contents of the letter after their relatives were able to pull up stakes and move to another state. I know all the family members involved. Another good Catholic family lost to that diocese.

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