By Mark Morris
Kansas City Star
October 26, 2011
http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/27/3233761/history-shows-diocese-can-get.html
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“Take abuse cases out of clerical hands” is how the National Catholic Reporter neatly summed up findings from a diocesan report on its handling of the Rev. Shawn Ratigan’s case.
The report, prepared by former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves, is a superb study of muddled thinking. Occasionally, a minor player steps forward to ask whether anybody had called police or identified the girls whose pictures were found on Ratigan’s computer. But for dreary stretches, the principal players simply thrash about, assuming that someone else was doing the right thing.
And that’s the charitable view, judging by many reactions to the recent indictment of Bishop Robert W. Finn and the diocese for allegedly failing to report child abuse for five months.
But while priests probably shouldn’t be investigating priests — even the diocese now recognizes that — clerics of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph once investigated a child abuse allegation with the zeal and vigor that was missing from its listless management of Ratigan.
Evidence for that is buried deep in federal civil court files.
Notes from a priest working at the chancery in 2004 show that a tipster contacted him on a July afternoon to report that a cleric may have had sexual contact with a teenage boy. The story was third-hand and murky, but the priest who received the report pulled the fire alarms.
He immediately contacted then-Bishop Raymond Boland and then-Vicar General Patrick Rush. Within hours, the diocese notified state child abuse workers.
Three days after the tip came in, the priest under suspicion appeared before the bishop to explain his side of the story, according to the notes. And the next day, the priest who received the tip collected the first of many written and verbal statements from other boys who knew whether the allegations were true.
Less than a week after the tip, the priest under suspicion was suspended formally from his duties at two parishes and informed he was under church investigation, even though the state already had closed its probe into the matter, finding no evidence to support the allegations.
The diocesan Independent Review Board met to consider the evidence. And less than a month after that chancery priest took the initial tip, the board concluded that the allegations were unfounded. Board members recommended, and Boland agreed, that should the newly exonerated priest be reassigned, his new parish should receive full disclosure about the probe.
The complete investigation, including those of the police and state child abuse specialists, took 28 days. And it began when a chancery priest received a tip and didn’t stop digging until he found the truth.
Who was that persistent priest?
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