KANSAS CITY (MO)
KCUR
[with audio]
By Alex Smith
On Friday the 25th, two lightning rods of controversy in the Roman Catholic Church community clashed when Kansas City’s Bishop Robert Finn publicly denounced the locally-based National Catholic Reporter.
Back in the Fall, Bishop Finn, who’s the head of the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese, was convicted of failing to report suspected child abuse, and the Reporter called for his resignation. Now, the Bishop says the paper’s anti-Church editorials have gone too far, and the Reporter should stop calling itself “Catholic.” This week, Alex Smith spoke with the National Catholic Reporter’s editor about the controversy and about covering a beat that doesn’t always welcome a critical eye.
In the mid-‘60s, The National Catholic Reporter broke away from the local diocese paper and established itself as an objective, independent newspaper reporting on the Catholic world. The Reporter quickly drew criticism from the Church for its coverage of civil rights issues as well as its critical editorials and investigative reporting. In 1967, the Reporter published leaked documents from the Vatican describing an internal debate over birth control. They revealed that the majority of the Pope’s theologians believed the church should change its teachings. The National Catholic Reporter editor Dennis Coday believes this was a great moment for the paper.
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