Mark Silk on Donohue's KC Fixation

"...why Bill Donohue is so intent on defending the indefensible behavior of Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn."
Good child of the COLD WAR, he needs a headline-grabbing CAUSE, because 'tis the season for the Catholic League's CHRISTMAS FUNDRAISER!

Memo to KC Star:
Take every dime Mr. Donohue wants to give you. Run every ad he wants to place. It will ultimately be a very profitable act of PUBLIC SERVICE to your community!

The Church has been badly served by its lawyrs for the last 40 years. Why change now? (By the way, constitutional law purists will agree that no law restricting freedom of speech means exactly that - no law). Still, you are correct - this bishop should go - and the new Nuncio is likely to arrange this quite soon.

Like almost all of his complicit colleagues, Finn is willing to do and say almost anything to avoid having to disclose more about his role in the inexcusable cover up of clergy sex crimes in KC.

He's basically trying to bully the prosecutor with this message: "Come after me hard and I'm gonna put up one hell of a fight."

Church officials will do whatever it takes to keep themselves off that witness stand, even at the cost of ruining a child's life.

How ugly does it get?

Judy Jones, SNAP Midwest Associate Director, USA 636-433-2511
snapjudy@gmail.com
"Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests" and all clergy.
http://www.snapnetwork.org/

Donohue is a mouthpiece for the hierarchs to say all the things that they can't say in public because it is too impolitic and crude. When Donohue started out he even had an office at the NY chancellory.

Donohue is so convenient for the hierarchs to plant one of their stink bombs in the media from time to time and they then don't have to take responsibility for it.

Where does Donohue get his money to run his operation? The board for his front group, The Catholic League, is a who's who of the Catholic reactionary right-wing. Donohue will never reveal it but I would wager that the USCCB funnels money to him through one of their dummy corporations or through something untraceable.

[Here in CA, it is widely believed that the hierarchs got a lot of cash to fund the "Yes on 8" campaign - denying civil rights for gay and lesbian Californians - through the Knights of Columbus and the Mormon Church. I'm sure that the hierarchs are more than capable of this kind of money-laundering.]

The Vatican doesn't give a wit about the people of Kansas City diocese - there will be no apostolic administrator. Keeping a dolt like Finn in office as long as possible is part of their overall strategic plan for the church: Drive the thinking people away because it is then easier to bully and control the dwindling pew-Catholic dead-enders that are left.

And, the hierarchs' fat investment portfolio should tide them over for a century or two when the bones of their rape and sodomy victims, and their critics, will have turned to dust long ago, and no one will be around who could remember how corrupt the hierarchs really are [were?].

It's happened before in church history. What is past is prologue!

Mr. Donohue defends Bishop Finn because Bishop Finn, a member of Opus Dei, is the kind of neo-con bishop that Mr. Donohue and others of his ideological persuasion believed would "save" the church from what they see as the utter dissolution and degradation brought about after (by?) Vatican II and by the bishops appointed to lead during Archbishop Jean Jadot's tenure as apostolic delegate. Since Bishop Finn served as a sign of the hoped-for episcopal messiah, it is unfathomable to folks like Mr. Donohue that one with Bishop Finn's conservative credentials could be incompetent, or even make a one-time grievous mistake of the magnitude of the present disaster. So defending Bishop Finn is more than sticking up for the individual bishop. It's defending a dream, an ecclesiology even, against devastating evidence to the contrary.

BILL DONOHUE AS POPE ? Thanks, MSW. Why not, some will ask? Many stranger things have happened in papal history. Bill tows the Roman line diligently. He is endorsed by the head of the US bishops, Timothy Dolan.

As I noted in my earlier comment to Mark Silk's current article, Bill Donohue, who presumably speaks with the blessings of the bishops and their lawyers, appears worried about the "domino effect". If a first bishop is finally criminally convicted for cover-up conduct, it will make it easier politically for prosecutors to indict and convict more bishops.

Bill appears to be pulling out all stops in KC. Unfortunately for the bishops, the principal effect of Bill's imprudent campaign seems to be to remind Catholics and prosecutors repeatedly of Finn's shameful failures in dealing with a priest child pornographer.

With the recent Penn State's horrors and the unlimited and continuous media attention, it is much too late for the bishops to stop more dominoes from falling, if not just plain crashing.

For information on Dolan's support for Bill, please click on at:

http://blog.archny.org/?p=931

For a very informative and spirited discussion of Bill's unusal campaign in Kansas City, please note the Commonweal discussion entitled, "Bill Donohue, Judge & Jury" , accessible by clicking on at:

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=15957

For more information on the effect of the Penn State scandal on the KC Finn case, please note the NCR comment and related cross links under the comment heading: "Penn State Anyone?" , accessible by clicking on at:

http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/avoid-indictment-bishop-agrees-...

This is what happens when Bishops abdicate their authority/responsibility in favor of lawyers. It certainly illustrates that there are no leaders in the church at persent.

The attorneys for the defense of any lawsuit have an ethical obligation to raise each and every argument they can within the bounds of law, and likely any insurance contact the Diocese has requires the same. And if there is an insurance company involved, they likely hired the attorney and are paying for the defense.

If the Diocese refused to let counsel assert a defense the insurance company(ies) involved could and likely would deny coverage and the Diocese would refuse to pay the attorneys' bill. It's the SOP of lawsuit defense, especially with an insurance company around. Rotten for publicity of course. And it's always possible that plaintiffs' attorneys have already refused a generous settlement offer made under a rule of confidentiality, since making such an offer is inadmissible as evidence.

Outside, looking in, during early stages of a lawsuit, is highly uninformative.

Now, aside from litigation, if and only if the defense corresponds to an earlier attitude, it might indicate an analytical perspective that led to leaving the offender in situ ... an incomplete analysis, if you will, of the issues presented.

As for Mr. Donohue with his front organization, it seems sometimes that no Bishop can do any wrong, unless that Bishop dissents from Tridentine thought.

The same KC Star reporter to whom you link, Mark Morris, had a more interesting story on Oct 27 about a case of possible child sex abuse in the KCSJ diocese in 2004 under the previous Bishop and Vicar General. It was immediately responded to, investigated, and responsibly wrapped up. The priest who received the report and acted so well on that case became bishop of that very diocese a year later, remaining in that office today in spite of his ongoing legal entanglements in 2 counties, including one criminal indictment.
http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/27/3233761/history-shows-diocese-can-g...

I am a bit at loss with the argument of this article. It seems that lawyers for the diocese of Kansas City claim that the bishop had no right to divulge the contents of Fr Ratigan's hard disk to the prosecution because that would invade into Fr Ratigan's constitutional rights. As someone who lives in old Europe I cannot judge if this claim makes sense or not.

However, if this is true, it seems that than Bishop Finn acted according to the Law of the United States and the State of Kansas, and not according to Canon Law. Since it is a common demand in commentaries on this website that clergy should follow the Law of the Land and not Canon Law, these people should rather praise Bishop Finn for being such a law-abiding citizen.

The longer Bishop Finn stays on the more damage to the Church in Kansas City -- as his lawyers are showing. For years the Church has done one self-destructive thing after another, from Rome on down. Maybe the Holy Spirit has had enough.

Bill Donahue comes off as a loudmouth bully. As Catholics we believe in absolute Truth because he was here with us on this good earth. For Donahue to start "relativizing" the issue in spirit of "defending the Church" he should just shut up.

The Crusades were about defending the Church, so was the Spanish Inquisition.......sorry Bill, the facts are the facts and no matter how much Bishop Finn and all of his cohorts wish to evade, deal, scheme, and reshape the issue. Bishop Finn was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Stop embarassing the Church, let the authorities do their job and pay the price of proper justice. The Church must purify itself, stop blocking the process Mr Donahue, the Holy Spirit is trying to work now.

It's "vacante." "Vacanta" is non-grammatical.

Bill Donahue has shown what the Catholic church has become - be as dishonest as you can about child rape, try to intimidate others (especially victims), and protect church money instead of church morals. Not What Jesus Would Do.

Here are some facts about his Catholic League ad, since he knows most Catholics don't read and don't care about the truth:

- the 2,000 word ad didn't mention the fact that Bishop Finn got a memo from a school principal about Ratigan being a pedophile back in May of 2010. It implies everything started in December of 2010.

- Murphy (and probably Finn) lied to the police. They told the police, by phone, that they had a single picture of a 2 year old relative, naked, and asked if it was child porn. The policeman (a friend) said no.

The truth, from pg 90 of the Todd Graves report, paid for by the Catholic church, shows:

- the picture was the last in a staged series of a 2 year old girl doing a "strip tease" out of a diaper
- the last picture was the one of her naked, private parts exposed, with the diaper completely off
- the computer was riddled with "up skirt" pictures Ratigan took of girls under 10 years old
- it was not the picture of anyone's relative
- Bishop Finn got a memo about Ratigan's pedophilia behavior from a school principal a year before he did anything about it (and now claims he never read it)

Bill Donahue and the Catholic League are doing the opposite of What Jesus Would Do, and the Catholic church does nothing to dissuade him. The congregation sits quietly, just like they did when they found out that children were being sexually abused by priests.

Bill Donahue is doing the work of the anti-christ, and the congregation won't complain.