UNITED STATES
Crux
By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor April 25, 2015
Americans may have lost their dominance in many sectors of the global economy in the early 21st century, but there’s one industry where we still unquestionably lead the pack: the manufacture of controversy.
American Catholics are no exception, and this week a fresh row broke out over Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the official overseas development arm of the US bishops. It turns out that CRS has a non-Catholic employee working in a technical post, nothing to do with faith or morals, who’s in a same-sex marriage.
Predictably, some folks are upset and are letting everyone know about it.
Whatever the merits of the fuss, here’s an observation you won’t find in most American debates: For Catholics in many other parts of the world, the whole thing seems a great example of a “luxury issue,” meaning the kind of argument that only affluent cultures and churches can afford to have. …
Why it took so long on Bishop Finn.
Now that the story of Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph has reached its inevitable denouement with his resignation, the main post-mortem curiosity is why it took so long to get here.
The Vatican announced Finn’s resignation on Tuesday, a full 2 1/2 years after he became the lone American bishop to be criminally convicted (albeit on a misdemeanor charge) of failure to report an allegation of child abuse. For most people, the inexplicable part is why it required 28 months for a bishop disgraced in such an utterly complete way to lose his job.
I was in Rome when the news broke, and a colleague in the Vatican press corps suggested the headline should be: “Finn … ally!”
Probably the best way to explain the delay is that it illustrates the dilemma that ensues when the broad significance of a case and its individual details aren’t in perfect alignment.
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