UNITED STATES
Pitch
Posted By Steve Vockrodt on Mon, Nov 17, 2014
A 60 Minutes report Sunday evening on CBS is the latest bit of circumstantial evidence that suggests Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn is losing, or has lost, his support in the Catholic Church hierarchy.
A segment from Sunday’s television news magazine, which you can watch here, profiled Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of the Boston Diocese and the United States cardinal for the Catholic Church. The CBS report cast O’Malley both as a close adviser to Pope Francis and an ardent reformer of three Catholic dioceses in the United States — Fall River, Massachusetts; Palm Beach, Florida; and Boston — that were racked by child-sex-abuse scandals.
Discussion turned toward a renewed sense of accountability for bishops in the Catholic Church under Pope Francis, so naturally the issue of Bishop Finn, head of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, came up.
CBS reporter Norah O’Donnell brought up Finn’s 2012 misdemeanor conviction (O’Donnell incorrectly described it as a guilty plea) in Jackson County on charges of obscuring child sex crimes committed by imprisoned Catholic priest Shawn Ratigan. Finn was the first bishop in the United States to answer to criminal charges related to the cover-up of sex crimes under his watch.
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.