UNITED STATES
Frontline
February 25, 2014 by Sarah Childress
The first report that church officials received about Father Shawn Ratigan, compiled by a Kansas City Catholic school principal in May 2010, was troubling.
Ratigan had taken hundreds of photographs of children, Julie Hess, the principal, wrote to church officials. He had tried to interact with kids on Facebook, and sometimes had physical contact with children in ways that appeared to other adults to be “boundary violations.”A pair of girl’s underwear was found in a planter in his backyard.
Parents and staff, Hess said, were “discussing whether he is a child molester.”
Bishop Robert Finn, who had authority over Ratigan, didn’t alert the police then, according to court documents. (Finn would later say he had only received a verbal summary of the letter from a deputy at the time.) He also didn’t call the police several months later, when a computer technician found hundreds of lewd photos of children on Ratigan’s laptop, most of which appeared to have been taken by a personal camera.
Instead, the laptop was turned over to the diocesan lawyer, and Finn called a psychiatrist, who said he thought he could help with Ratigan’s “severe loneliness that has caused this problem.”
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