UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Finn’s Law: Pope Rules Police Must Handle Child Crimes! Must Pope, Ex-Pope, Et Al. Now Go For Breaking Finn’s Law, President Obama?
US President Barack Obama’s official international broadcast outlet has now weighed in on “Finn’s Law” as reported below. Pope Francis’ Vatican announced Bishop Robert Finn’s resignation April 21, indicating that the evidently forced resignation resulted from the Catholic Church’s papally dictated Code of Canon Law that applies to all Bishops, even to himself as the Bishop of Rome and to Cardinal Bishops. Canon Law says, “A diocesan bishop who has become less able to fulfill his office because of ill health or some other grave cause is earnestly requested to present his resignation from office.” (emphasis mine) The “grave cause” was Finn’s seemingly single failure to report a child pornographer priest to the police as promptly as required by local Missouri law. The long overdue legal precedent set by Pope Francis, “Finn’s Law”, is now finally fixed, Amen! Finn’s Law can now be stated simply:
Bishops who fail to report promptly to the police facts indicating possible priest sexual abuse of children are unfit as pastors and will be removed.
Of course, if applied with legal logic, few bishops, including the pope apparently, would remain in office. For example, the pope’s secretive mishandling of Archbishop Wesolowski’s alleged crimes seems clearly to violate Finn’s Law. The pope is obviously a “son of the Church {hierarchy}”, however, more than he is a logical and principled Jesuit. Please see below the links to the details of the earlier child protection failures of the pope and of his “sex abuse czar”, Cardinal Sean O’Malley. It seems clear, to me at least, that the pope in dumping Finn is merely responding to concerns of some of his key major US donors in a pre-US presidential election year. Will the pope at least now apply Finn’s Law to reported failures of Finn’s former St. Louis mentors, Cardinals Rigali, Dolan and Burke? Not likely, no? More likely, Finn will get a comfortable appointment after the media moves on, as happened with the extravagant Bishop of Bling recently. Meanwhile, US politicians will generally continue to look the other way as long as the pope’s poll numbers remain high, despite the continuing risk of sexual abuse to millions of US children.
The huge clout of wealthy US donors on the Catholic hierarchy is personified by Cardinal Dolan. See his recent conference with Goldman Sachs’ CEO and his earlier “the pope loves the rich” spiel on the CNBC international business network here,
and here,
[CNBC]
Incidentally, Goldman Sachs is a major banker in oil and gas related investments. One of the pope’s top financial advisers is a top Goldman official and former longtime top official at BP. Time will tell how this papal relationship will impact the pope’s over-hyped and imminent encyclical on climate change, which could lead to increases in regulation of the oil and gas industry.
US President Barack Obama, and all other US national political leaders of both political parties, have generally and shamefully ducked the bishop unaccountability travesty despite the harm to hundreds of thousands of US citizens. Significantly, however, Obama’s official international broadcast outlet, Voice of America (VOA), reported on Finn’s ouster, while also gratuitously adding to its report references to the Chilean Bishop Barros’ scandal and to BishopAccountability’s criticism.
Obama’s VOA report significantly noted that the Vatican did not give a specific reason for Finn’s resignation. The brief report then reportedly added: “Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, an online abuse resource group, said in a statement that Finn’s resignation was ‘a good step but just a beginning,’ and called on the pontiff to publicly state that he removed Finn for failing to protect children. ‘The pope must show that this decision represents a meaningful shift in papal practice, that it shows a new era in bishop accountability,’ Barrett Doyle said. ‘That would be unprecedented, and it would send a bracing message to bishops and religious superiors worldwide that a new era has begun.’ “
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.