UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It’s a huge deal and major accountability moment for a Church that frankly hasn’t had enough of them. The Vatican is getting it at last.
The resignation of bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St Joseph, Missouri last week is a watershed moment in the history of the Catholic Church: the first time that a bishop was directly forced to resign for poorly handling a case of priestly child abuse. Finn was sentenced for maintaining in ministry and failing to report a priest on whose computer a piece of child pornography was found.
Let’s acknowledge this first: Since the Catholic sex abuse crisis first came to light 15 years ago, the Church has taken enormous steps to remedy the problem, especially under the too-little-noticed but vigorous guidance of Pope Benedict XVI—including extremely tough accountability rules for priests. And indeed sex abuse cases have dropped precipitously.
But the true underlying problem, and the reason why the sex abuse scandal was such a crisis for the Church, was never with the priests. It was always with the bishops. All religious denominations suffer from sex abuse problems simply because predators look for positions where they have access to children, and Catholics are no worse off than anybody else.
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