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Bill’s ‘Faith Matters’ Blog
Pope Francis last week fired a bishop who has been accused of protecting a priest suspected of child abuse.
Finn-1That was the good news. The bad news for people in the Kansas City area is that the bishop in question wasn’t Robert W. Finn of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. (Finn in this photo is seen greeting visitors to the newly refurbished downtown diocesan headquarters when it opened in 2011.)
Finn, as surely most of you know, was convicted two years ago of a misdemeanor for failing to report suspected child abuse by an area priest.
The pontiff’s action removing Bishop Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano from his position as head of the diocese of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay was an indication of what seems to be the pope’s growing commitment to cleaning up the priest sexual abuse scandal. He’s moving too slowly, if you ask me, and I’m not at all sure that he’s recognized all of the causes of the scandal and moved to undo them. But he’s moving in the right direction.
Indeed, The National Catholic Reporter published this story yesterday indicating that Bishop Finn finally is under investigation by the Vatican.
As the story to which I’ve linked you in the first paragraph above notes, the pope’s action against the bishop in Paraguay came shortly after his approval of the arrest in the Vatican of a former archbishop who was accused of paying for sex with children while he was a papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic.
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