UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture
By Dr. Jeff Mirus | Sep 30, 2014
Frankly, I was among the most vigorous supporters of Bishop Robert Finn when he took over the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in May of 2005. It did not take this “Opus Dei” bishop long to start making the kinds of changes which are so critical to both Catholic renewal and the New Evangelization. I did not hesitate to provide a long list of reasons to praise Bishop Finn after his first year in a piece called Everything’s Up To Date in Kansas City. And when I rerview that commentary today, I am still struck by how promising Finn’s leadership looked.
Unfortunately, Bishop Finn was somewhat tangentially caught in the sex abuse scandal in 2011 when he failed to report to civil authorities a priest who had child pornography on his computer. Given the rather fuzzy circumstances of Finn’s failure, I did not regard it as extremely significant, except in the sense that a failure to be absolutely on top of these things in today’s Church really does raise questions of competence. Finn’s failure in this regard inevitably called his leadership into question, even more when he granted at least one jurisdiction the right to regularly review the diocese’s handling of sex abuse in return for dropping charges against him. To me, letting civil government into Church administration is the last thing a bishop should ever do.
Now the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph has been the subject of an Apostolic Visitation to determine Bishop Finn’s fitness for leadership. The news was broken (not surprisingly) by the National Catholic Reporter, a newspaper whose middle name is an oxymoron. But it is interesting that the primary question asked by Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa—the Apostolic Visitor—did not involve Finn’s handling of sexual abuse. The primary question was this: “Do you think he is fit to be a leader?”
And therein lies a tale.
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