Vatican Investigates Kansas City Bishop

Father Shawn Ratigan of Independence, Missouri, liked to take pictures of naked little girls.
He especially liked little girls between the ages of 2 and 12. He liked to make them pose for him—sometimes completely nude, sometimes sprawled out on the grass of the fenced-in parish lawn, and sometimes he made them pull their panties away from their buttocks and vaginas so he could get a better view. Sometimes he stole pictures in what authorities would call “up-skirt” covert images of little girls’ crotches from under tables or in the nearby Catholic school playground. He used a digital camera or his cellphone, downloading hundreds if not thousands of the pedo-pornographic pictures onto his laptop. Ratigan would probably still be producing child pornography if a computer technician named Ken Kes hadn’t found the disturbing images on the priest’s computer in 2009 when the Kansas City diocese called him to repair the sluggish machine. According to a Reuters report outlining the priest’s sins, Kes found the “odd images” when he was fixing the priest’s laptop. continue