Another lawsuit against Bishop Robert Finn

Justice Kendall
Pitch News
Sept. 23, 2011

The Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Bishop Robert Finn and the Rev. Shawn Ratigan are facing yet another lawsuit alleging a cover-up of the alleged discovery of child pornography on Ratigan's computer (Ratigan is facing state and federal child-porn charges). The details of how the diocese handled the discovery are disgusting, if true.
KCTV5 reported that the lawsuit alleges that Finn, the diocese's attorney and others gave Ratigan's laptop computer to the priest's family rather than authorities because they knew the family would destroy the computer — and evidence along with it — giving them "plausible deniability that they were incompetents rather than intentionally assisting Ratigan, as they were."

The lawsuit alleges that the girl met Ratigan in 2006 at her great-grandfather's funeral mass, which Ratigan was presiding over.

Ratigan allegedly kept in contact with the girl's family through 2011. He's accused of taking sexually explicit photos of the girl beginning in 2008, including an incident in which he allegedly posed the girl in a sexually explicit manner while she slept. Ratigan is then accused of uploading the photos to his computer and the Internet.

The lawsuit alleges that the photos of the girl were among those found on Ratigan's laptop by a computer tech in December 2010. The tech turned the computer over to a deacon, who allegedly talked the tech out of notifying the police. The deacon allegedly contacted Monsignor Robert Murphy, whose job was to handle allegations of sexual abuse against priests (Murphy is no longer in that role).

The lawsuit says Murphy contacted a police officer, who is also a member of the church, but vaguely described one of the more innocent photos on the computer. The computer was then given to Julie Creech, the diocese's director of management information systems, who learned that the computer tech had discovered "hundreds of photographs of young children, primarily girls," including nude photos.

Creech and diocese spokeswoman Rebecca Summers both told Murphy to call the authorities, but he didn't, the lawsuit alleges. Murphy allegedly led Summers to believe that he'd spoken with the authorities, when he had just consulted the police captain who was a member of the church, the lawsuit says.

Murphy did consult Finn, the lawsuit says, and reportedly repeatedly lied to cover for Ratigan and the diocese.

"Monsignor had no such plan to consult with a police officer now that he had ‘too much' information about the child pornography on the computer of an employee of the Diocese," the lawsuit alleges. "The plan approved by Finn and the Diocese was to evade, conceal and destroy evidence only by sophisticated means that might create the appearance that defendants, including Ratigan, were incompetents."

The images on Ratigan's laptop were copied and given to diocese attorney Jon Haden, which the lawsuit alleges was an attempt to cover up through attorney-client privilege.

The lawsuit alleges that Finn invented a request from Ratigan's family for the computer — and the computer was given to them so they would destroy it along with the computer's Internet history and "the evidence of the receipt and distribution of the child pornography it contained."

The authorities were finally contacted in May, and Ratigan was arrested.

The diocese is again denying the allegations in the lawsuit.

This isn't the first lawsuit against the diocese, Finn and Ratigan. In August, a lawsuit was filed against Ratigan accusing him of taking "sexually explicit photographs" of a young girl at an Easter-egg hunt at the Sisters of St. Francis Convent in Independence on Easter Sunday.

A lawsuit filed in June also accuses the diocese, Finn and Ratigan of engaging in a cover-up. This lawsuit was brought by the parents of a girl who allege that Ratigan took pictures of their daughter when she was 2 or 3 years old.