KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star
Editorial
A scathing arbitration decision released this week adds to the shame of Bishop Robert Finn’s leadership of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph.
The stunning denunciation hit area Catholics almost six years after the church signed a $10 million settlement with 47 people who said they or a family member were sexually abused by priests.
Yet arbitrator Hollis Hanover, who handled a breach of contract lawsuit filed in 2011 that grew out of the 2008 settlement, concluded that top Catholic officials purposefully did not carry through on some pledges.
Hanover awarded $1.1 million to most of the same plaintiffs in the original lawsuit. He essentially said the church had failed to live up to its promise to take aggressive actions to deal with future sexual abuse of children. Church members once again are faced with paying for the mistakes Finn and others have made.
With that dereliction of duty, Hanover said, the church imposed even more emotional damage on the plaintiffs. They had expected that the problems they suffered would lead to wholesale positive changes by the church. Instead, he wrote, the diocese “had once again sacrificed the welfare of children so that it could ‘save the priesthood’ of a criminal, in this case a pornographer.”
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