UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
Kevin O’Brien
This was my first post on Bishop Finn. It’s from October 23, 2011. Since this post, Fr. Ratigan was convicted and sentenced to fifty years in prison. Bishop Finn spent $1.4 million of diocesan money to defend himself, but was also convicted in criminal court of failure to report child abuse; he was placed on probation and fined. He has been serving as bishop of Kansas City ever since his conviction, though such a conviction would have prevented him from even being a crossing guard at a public school. He finally resigned today, under pressure from the Vatican.
The Catholic Defense League and Opus Dei and some of Finn’s fellow bishops shamed themselves by vigorously defending Bishop Finn, and in the case of the Catholic Defense League, spinning the story to a point where the facts of the case were utterly distorted.
My original post garnered 99 comments, some of them very angry at me for daring to attack a doctrinally orthodox bishop. It remains the third most read post in the history of this blog. It deserves reposting today, but I’m not allowing comments. My entire series of posts on Finn, written in the 3 1/2 years since the one below, can be read here.
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“Let’s step outside and settle this thing like men,” she said, and she was a lady. “You’re spewing anti-Catholic rhetoric!” he insisted. “How can you criticize a bishop when you’re an actor and everyone knows actors are perverts and nitwits,” she screamed. (That last gal had a point).
These are all reactions to my post last week about Rod Dreher’s article on Bishop Finn’s Indictment.
And above all, people are charging me with believing the biased media coverage of the scandal.
This, at least, is not true. In fact, everything I say in this post will be taken not from a media account of the scandal, but from the independent report on it as commissioned by the diocese, the Graves Report, which you can read on your own here.
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.