Accountability and Bishop Finn

KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Register

by JOAN FRAWLEY DESMOND 04/23/2015

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Bishop Joseph Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., resigned April 21 — one week after a meeting in Rome with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, where he tendered his resignation.

Bishop Finn’s resignation — a direct consequence of his misdemeanor conviction in 2012 for failing to report sexual misconduct by a diocesan priest — was another clear signal of the determination of Pope Francis and other Church leaders to hold bishops directly accountable for the mishandling of sexual-abuse allegations.

The April 21 daily Vatican news bulletin briefly confirmed that Pope Francis had accepted Bishop Finn’s resignation. The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph subsequently released a statement from the bishop, along with the news that Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., will serve as the apostolic administrator of the diocese until a new bishop is appointed. …

Push for Accountability

The apostolic visitation in Bishop Finn’s diocese highlighted the Vatican’s commitment to hold bishops accountable for failures to remove and report priests who posed a risk to minors, and it reflected ongoing concerns that Bishop Finn had lost credibility with his priests and local Catholics.

Last November, during an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who leads the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors that Pope Francis created in March 2014, said Bishop Finn’s status was “a question the Holy See needs to address urgently.”

Lay members of the commission on clergy sexual abuse also called for his removal, but sources on that commission told the Register that they had no power to address individual cases.

However, Bishop Finn’s resignation took place immediately after commission members assembled April 12 in Rome for a meeting that discussed his case in the context of a broader consideration of bishops’ accountability.

A source with knowledge of events leading up to Bishop Finn’s resignation, speaking on background, told the Register that he had been summoned to Rome for the April 14 meeting with Cardinal Ouellet and had canceled his appointments last week in order to make the trip.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.