Tom Fox, publisher of the National Catholic Reporter, has announced his retirement after a long career with the independent newsweekly that covered the clergy sex abuse scandal in the 1980s and later called for the removal of a bishop convicted of failing to report abuse.

Fox, who started work for the Kansas City-based National Catholic Reporter as editor in 1980, announced his retirement Monday in the newspaper's online edition.

He said in an email Thursday he was "quite proud" of NCR's coverage, beginning in June 1985, of the clergy sex abuse scandal.

"We focused on the stories of the survivors, the continued abuse they endured by church priests and bishops who repeatedly attacked them while covering their tracks," Fox said. "Proud we continued this coverage week after week after week for some 15 years - yes, 15 years - before dailies like the Boston Globe and New York Times picked up the story."

"We were a team of editors and we took enormous heat from church hierarchy and many others who kept saying we were exaggerating the story," Fox said.

The National Catholic Reporter has often been applauded for its coverage of the church, but NCR has also taken criticism from others, including Bishop Robert Finn, former leader of the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese. Finn said in an editorial in the diocesan newspaper a few years ago that parishioners were angry over NCR's challenge to Catholic orthodoxy on several topics, including ordination of women.

NCR later called for Finn's resignation or removal after he was convicted and sentenced to probation for failing to report a priest's suspected child abuse. Finn resigned as leader of the diocese last year.

Fox was first named NCR publisher in 1996 and served until the end of 2005 when he retired — for the first time. Fox returned as NCR editor in 2008 and was publisher pro tem until a new publisher, Joe Feuerherd, was hired. Fox was then named publisher again in 2011 after Feuerherd's death.

Dennis Coday, editor of NCR, said Thursday that Caitlin Hendel, NCR's CEO and president, replaces Fox as publisher of NCR, which recently celebrated its 50-year anniversary. The newspaper is published every other week and has a circulation of about 33,000, with 1.5 million monthly online visits. Its staff includes about 20 full-time editorial staffers.

Coday said under Fox, NCR also made major contributions to reporting from Central America and to bringing environmental issues to the forefront as a religious cause.

"The danger of running a religious newspaper or news outlet is that it can easily steer into kind of piety or soft featurey kinds of things," Coday said. "And what Tom did with his leadership he kept the newspaper firmly in the mainstream of journalism throughout his career."