UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Joshua J. McElwee Brian Roewe Dennis Coday | Apr. 21, 2015
VATICAN CITY AND KANSAS CITY, MO. U.S. Bishop Robert Finn, the Catholic prelate in the U.S. heartland who became a symbol internationally of the church’s failures in addressing the sexual abuse crisis, has resigned. He was the first bishop criminally convicted of mishandling an abusive priest yet remained in office for another two and a half years.
The Vatican announced Finn’s resignation as head of the diocese of St. Joseph-Kansas City, Mo., in a note in its daily news bulletin Tuesday.
While the note did not provide any reason for the move, it is rare for bishops in the Catholic church to resign without cause before they reach the traditional retirement age of 75.
Finn, who is 62 and had led the diocese since 2005, was neither assigned a new diocese nor as yet given a new leadership role in the church.
Other than for reasons of health, only one other bishop among the some 200 U.S. Catholic dioceses and eparchies has resigned his role in such a manner in at least the past decade. …
In February 2014, Kansas City Catholics engaged a canon lawyer and made a formal request that the Vatican initiate a penal process to determine whether Finn violated church law in the case of Shawn Ratigan, a then-priest of the diocese convicted of child pornography charges, whom Finn failed to report to civil authorities.
In September 2014, Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa, Ontario, came to Kansas City for a Vatican investigation known as an apostolic visitation to interview more than a dozen people as part of an investigation into Finn’s leadership.
Prendergast told those he interviewed from Sept. 22-26 that he was there on behalf of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops.
Smith said in a brief interview Tuesday that Finn had met with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, April 14 in Rome. The bishop, Smith said, then spoke with U.S. apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Vigano on Monday, at which final details of the resignation were determined.
There “probably were conversations that went on all the way up to yesterday about when or how this transition would take place,” Smith said.
The overlap of Finn’s Rome visit with a meeting of the new Vatican commission on clergy sexual abuse on April 12 was a “kind of coincidence,” Smith said. …
Commission member Peter Saunders said in an interview Tuesday that the members discussed Finn’s case at the meeting.
“I believe that there was already some movement on the Finn case, from what Cardinal O’Malley said, so I think this was going to happen,” Saunders said. “But maybe we were in some small way instrumental in ensuring that it did.”
While the Vatican bulletin does not say Finn was removed from office (instead, it says the pope accepted his resignation), such moves are still rare in the church.
The last Catholic prelate to be removed from diocesan office was Paraguayan Bishop Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, whom Francis removed in September mainly over accusations that he had not adequately managed his diocese and had caused strife with other prelates.
The last U.S. bishop who resigned at such an early age was former Scranton, Pa., Bishop Joseph Martino, who resigned in 2009 at age 63 mainly over concerns that he was mismanaging and was divisive in his diocese.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the former archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland, who resigned in 2013 after admitting to sexual misconduct, on March 20 resigned “the rights and privileges of a cardinal.” Those include advising the pope, holding membership in Vatican congregations and councils, and electing a new pope.
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