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Bill Donohue released the following comments today:

The Catholic Left has been trying to unseat Kansas City-St. Joseph Bishop Robert Finn for well over a year. Their effort received another boost today from the New York Times. It deserves a response.

The Times says that Finn’s conviction of a misdemeanor “stemmed from his failure to report the Rev. Shawn Ratigan to the authorities after hundreds of pornographic pictures that Father Ratigan had taken of young girls were discovered on his laptop in December 2010.”

That statement is factually wrong. On October 15, 2011 the Times mentioned there was “a single photo of a young girl, nude from the waist down,” and “hundreds of photographs of children” showing “upskirt images and images focused on the crotch.”

Now anyone who takes such pictures is clearly disturbed. But it also needs to be said that crotch shots are not pornographic. Moreover, the diocese described the “single photo” of a naked girl to a police officer who served on the diocesan sexual review board, and he said it did not constitute pornography.

JoltinJoe wrote:The sad part about all this is you use to be young and cool. A football player.

Now you're a pathetic, sad loser of an internet troll who gets google alerts anytime the word "catholic" appears in a news story.

JoltinJoe wrote: Now you're a pathetic, sad loser of an internet troll who gets google alerts anytime the word "catholic" appears in a news story.

Skjellyfetti wrote:

JoltinJoe wrote: Now you're a pathetic, sad loser of an internet troll who gets google alerts anytime the word "catholic" appears in a news story.

And, you must have some sort of alert for Catholic threads in the political forum.

I mean, you don't have a post in the FCS forum since last February but post within the hour whenever D1B starts a thread.

Skjellyfetti wrote:

JoltinJoe wrote: Now you're a pathetic, sad loser of an internet troll who gets google alerts anytime the word "catholic" appears in a news story.

And, you must have some sort of alert for Catholic threads in the political forum.

I mean, you don't have a post in the FCS forum since last February but post within the hour whenever D1B starts a thread.

Bill's (Donohue) got his knickers in a twist because the New York Times has stated that Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn's criminal conviction “stemmed from his failure to report the Rev. Shawn Ratigan to the authorities after hundreds of pornographic pictures that Father Ratigan had taken of young girls were discovered on his laptop in December 2010.” Asserteth Donohue: "That statement is factually wrong."

He then goes on to argue, as he has before, that what was discovered on Ratigan's computer was not pornography. So what was Finn convicted of? He doesn't say.

Factually speaking, Ratigan did have child porn. Here's a passage from the Graves Report, commissioned by the diocese of K.C. itself, describing a series of the priest's photos as described by diocesan information systems manager Julie Creech:

The first showed a little girl, face visible, standing and holding a blanket. In a “staged sequence,” the photos depicted a girl lying in a bed, from the waist down, and focused on the crotch. The girl was wearing a diaper, but with each photo, the diaper was moved gradually to expose her genitals. By the last photo, her genitals were fully exposed. According to Ms. Creech, there were approximately six to eight pictures in this sequence of photos; two displayed fully exposed genitals and one displayed her fully exposed buttocks. The little girl’s face was not visible in the staged sequence, but due to her apparent physical size and the fact that the photos were in the same folder, Ms. Creech assumed the photos were of the same little girl whose face appeared in the initial picture.