KC Media that Destroyed Bishop Finn Won’t Cover Far Larger Teacher-Sex Scandal

Very interesting piece from The American Thinker regarding ongoing – and atrocious – teacher sex abuse scandals in the state of Missouri, especially the Kansas City area.  While the vast majority of the populations of Kansas and Missouri are extremely conservative (in fact, Kansas is a hotbed of sede vacantism), the elites in the large cities are overwhelmingly leftist, as are the media.

Bishop Finn was not only conservative but also suspected of embracing Tradition (as his very close association with the Benedictines of Mary Queen of the Apostles revealed).  For that, he had to be destroyed.  He remains the only US bishop ever to face criminal prosecution for ostensible malfeasance in a priest sex abuse case, even though the priest in question committed crimes that pale in comparison to those enabled by left-leaning bishops in the US and elsewhere.  Bishop Finn followed legal protocol and advice in his treatment of defrocked Fr. Shawn Ratigan, and removed him from service after he was found to have taken  upskirt photos of underage girls. But Fr. Ratigan repeated his (comparitively minor) crime, and the KC media had all the material they needed to mount a relentless campaign of destruction.

For instance, did you know that the local newspaper, the Kansas City Star, published NINETY articles attacking Bishop Finn during this campaign?  But Cardinal Mahoney, who had personal knowledge of actual boy-rape perpetrated repeatedly by certain priests, kept those priests in public apostolates, and he remained a cardinal in good standing throughout his tenure, and is still revered and feted around the country and world.

I hate leftism:

On April 15, Jackson County, Missouri, prosecutors charged James R. Green Jr., 52, with six counts of second-degree statutory sodomy. Green was a teacher and coach at a middle school in the suburban North Kansas City School District. Green’s victim was a sixteen-year-old boy. It appears likely that Green was abusing other boys over a period of at least twelve years in at least two different school districts, and Green’s crime is not the half of it…….

…….Without digging too hard, I discovered that Green was the sixth employee, all male, busted on sex charges with underage students in the last thirteen months in this one suburban school district. At least five of those employees were arrested. The reporting on the sixth was too sketchy to determine. Four of the interactions were heterosexual, two homosexual. In the same week Green was arrested, a campus supervisor at a high school in the North Kansas City District was charged with sending messages of a sexual nature to two female students, one fourteen and one fifteen. His was one of three cases at that same suburban school. In January 2017, the principal was arrested for having sex with students twenty years prior, and in August 2016 the band director was dismissed for sending sexual texts to students………

…….As troubling as these crimes were, what I found truly scandalous was that our local paper of record, the Kansas City Star, has not reported on this larger story. Typically, the paper has done brief one-offs on each crime and then moved on to something meatier, like, say, the latest imagined outrage by Gov. Brownback.

The reason for the silence is not hard to understand. The media and the teachers unions share an allegiance to the Democratic Party. The Star goes out of its way to protect the unions, and the unions have gone out of their way to protect the teachers, including the sexual predators………

………..[While steadfastly ignoring the far larger teacher-student rape scandal]the Star was dedicating its energies to Shawn Ratigan, a Catholic priest with the perverse habit of taking lurid photos of little girls unaware they were being photographed.

For the Star, the Ratigan scandal was tailor made. Unlike most accused priests, his pathology was heterosexual. Better still, the priest’s ultimate supervisor, Bishop Robert Finn, was described in media reports as a “theological conservative” with a record of challenging the Star’s agenda on life issues. [Yes. Don’t think that didn’t play a substantial role, especially when Finn several times publicly embarrassed the rag by refuting some of their pro-abort coverage]

The Star assigned its ace project reporter, Judy Thomas, to the Ratigan story. Locally, she had a reputation for seeking dirt on pro-life institutions, Catholic and evangelical. At the first whiff of the Ratigan scandal, the Star started to run above-the-fold headlines and soon called for the bishop’s resignation. “It’s painful to believe the most vulnerable in his flock weren’t protected,” thundered a Star editorialist. [Meanwhile, almost all the Star’s coverage of teacher sex abuse, which in some cases is even more systematic than it ever was in the Church, is buried deep in the paper if it is published at all]

After the photos were discovered, Ratigan attempted suicide. Bishop Finn consulted with his attorneys, and they assured him that what Ratigan had done may have been perverse, but it was not criminal. When Ratigan recovered, Finn assigned him to a home for aged nuns and imposed numerous restrictions. They did not work. Ratigan was caught taking photos at a family reunion.

The Star ran at least ninety articles on the Ratigan case, creating enough hysteria to get Ratigan a fifty-year prison sentence and get Finn, a saintly man, prosecuted for failure to report Ratigan to the police immediately. [And giving a hostile pope all the ammunition he needed to replace this good bishop years before the normal retirement age.]

Over the years, Catholic dioceses have dramatically altered their policies for identifying, reporting and removing alleged clerical predators, but, with cover from the media, public school districts have been largely insulated from any efforts to reform union practices.

Star editors went so far as to call Bishop Finn “repulsive,” but they have yet to mention the name of the man who runs the North Kansas City School District. As I have discovered, it is not just the national media that need to be watched. No, the local media are just as bad, maybe worse. [Which is why I dropped my subscription to the Dallas Morning News about 8 years ago.]

It was a hatchet job from beginning to end, deliberately construed to whip up enough public frenzy to get Finn not just charged, but convicted and then ultimately removed.

But Ace makes a great point.  The media – all media, entertainment, infotainment, “news,” etc. – only has the influence on us we choose to allow it to have.  If you are an expert in a certain field, or have a decent depth of knowledge, haven’t you noticed how often the media butchers related topics, and makes error after error?  Sure we discount the media’s political bias, but what about their cultural bias or even their plain knowledge of the world? Why would you believe they would be any more right in any other field?

Thus, the alternative media.  I am surprised, however, at the extent even people who should – who do! – know better still allow themselves to be moved on numerous issues by media opinion.  I just had the case of a (not terribly close) family member opining that “gay marriage” was just fine by them, because “they are in love and that’s who they are and how can we ‘deny them happiness'”?  Parroting almost word for word what the mass media says. Yet these same individuals see through the media lies regarding Trump. Discouraging.

Then again, they’re episcopalian, so go figure.