Holding Bishop Finn to account

Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., will go on trial September 24 for charges of failing to report suspected child abuse.

The alleged failure to report involves Fr. Shawn Ratigan, who is charged with possession of child pornography.

The Kansas City Star reported:

Authorities arrested Ratigan in May 2011, five months after officials and staff at the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph found hundreds of lewd images of young girls on a laptop computer that the priest had sent for servicing.

In the ensuing furor of how church officials handled the discovery, authorities charged Bishop Robert Finn and the diocese in Jackson County each with a misdemeanor count of failure to report suspicions of child abuse. A trial on those counts is scheduled for September.

That is how church officials should be held to account for such failures: In open court.

Lynn gets three to six years

Catholic Monsignor William Lynn "was sentenced on Tuesday to three to six years in prison" for covering up sex abuse, often by transferring predatory priests to unsuspecting parishes, where they continued their predation:

Judge M. Teresa Sarmina told Lynn, 61, the former secretary of the clergy for the Philadelphia Archdiocese, that he protected "monsters in clerical garb who molested children.

Lynn is the highest ranking church official thus far "found criminally liable for child-sex crimes by a priest."

It sets an example by holding an administrator responsible for his involvement. Specifically, the "just following orders" defense was rejected:

Key to Lynn's conviction on June 22, according to the jury foreman, was the monsignor's own testimony that he followed the cardinal's orders to attribute priest's moves to health reasons but never to sex abuse accusations. Testimony also showed Bevilacqua ordered the list of accused priests be destroyed, although a lone copy was found in an archdiocese safe.

Tuesday's sentence sent a message that should be underline for churches of every faith. As the New York Times reported:

“I think this is going to send a very strong signal to every bishop and everybody who worked for a bishop that if they don’t do the right thing, they may go to jail,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “They can’t just say ‘the bishop made me do it.’ That’s not going to be an excuse that holds up in court.”

Southern Babtoys Corporation

Southern Babtoys Corporation still offers their explodotoy stocking stuffer.
It's the worst gift that keeps on giving, for the rest of the recipient's life, no matter how vigorously those who get one try to throw it away. Details here.
No refunds. No responsibility accepted by the vendor (blame the store).
Abroad there is ever less toleration for manufacturers of similar products.
Executives are being required to resign in Ireland and a nationwide investigation is in the works.
Yet in Nasheville, the sleep of conscience is undisturbed.

Religious sex offenders may be worst

Analyzing of the criminal records and self-reported religious affiliations of 111 incarcerated sex offenders, researchers Donna Eshuys and Stephen Smallbone at Australia's Griffith University found:

... that stayers (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crime, serve to deter sexual offending behavior.

Another study found evidence that sexual predators consider churches an attractive environment. In 2003 one predator told a researcher [.pdf]:

I considered church people easy to fool ... they have a trust that comes from being Christians...They tend to be better folks all around. And they seem to want to believe in the good that exists in all people ... I think they want to believe in people. And because of that, you can easily convince, with or without convincing words.

Despite their limitations, these studies do suggest that predators who stay in church understand how to manipulate the environment in ways which permit them to continue their predatory careers.

Neither possibility is a surprise to either the victims of clerical predators or those who labor for reform of church practices.

Puzzled Cardinal Mahony gets 0 twitter love

"Mystified and puzzled" Cardinal Roger Mahony got no twitter love in his efforts to comprehend a federal grand jury investigation into the handling of alleged clergy child molestation cases by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

David Clohessy, director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said he was stunned but gladdened by the report.

The LATimes said the prosecutors are applying an honest services legal theory in an apparently novel way” by trying to determine whether church officials’ actions constituted a fraud against parishioners. The applicable federal statute that bars conspiracies to deprive others of honest services, and in this case, the victims would be parishioners who entrusted the safety of their children to church leaders.

If the approach is "novel," it's an interesting novel. One wonders whether other denominations might yet find their own pages in it. Others whose conspiratorial silence contributes to the serial abuse of young parishioners.