CANADA
Ottawa Citizen
ANDREW DUFFY
Published on: October 5, 2014
Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast has been dispatched by the Vatican on an investigative mission to Kansas City to examine the leadership of that city’s embattled bishop.
Prendergast travelled to Missouri late last month to interview priests and other diocesan officials about Bishop Robert Finn and his suitability as head of the Kansas City diocese.
Finn has been under intense pressure to resign his position in the two years since his misdemeanour conviction for failing to report a suspected case of child abuse by a priest. He was sentenced to two years of probation in September 2012.
Court heard that Finn failed to tell authorities that Rev. Shawn Ratigan’s computer had been found with hundreds of lewd images of young girls, most of them photos taken by the priest in local school yards, playgrounds and at church events. The pictures focused on the girls’ genitals.
But it was six months before Ratigan’s disturbing behaviour was reported to police by church officials acting without Finn’s approval. …
Prendergast’s three-day visit to Kansas City represents the second time in the past three years that he has been tapped by the Vatican for a sensitive mission.
In early 2011, Prendergast was sent to the Irish archdiocese of Tuam as part of a high-profile delegation that assessed the church’s response to the horrific child sex-abuse scandal in that country.
The initiative followed a series of damning Irish government reports on widespread child abuse by clergy and others associated with the Catholic Church. In one Irish diocese, Cloyne, abuses were still being covered up as late as 2009 — 13 years after the church in Ireland issued guidelines to ensure that sexual abuse cases involving the clergy were reported to authorities.
Prendergast has spoken about the need for more transparency in the Catholic Church, and in 2011 he stood firm against a loud chorus of local Catholics who did not want him to refer the case of Rev. Joe LeClair to the police for investigation.
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