Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn under Vatican investigation

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The National Catholic Reporter has a certain reputation, which may make them a less than desirable news source for discussion here. Moreover, a year ago Bishop Finn publicly rebuked the NCR, which is headquartered in his diocese.

I am not saying that the National Catholic Reporter’s coverage will be biased, however, the specter of that bias will be raised. So I would like to add another news source regarding this story:

**Vatican examines KC Bishop Robert Finn’s leadership, diocese confirms **

The Vatican dispatched a church official this month to Kansas City to examine the leadership of Catholic Bishop Robert Finn, a spokesman for the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese said Monday.

Jack Smith, communications director for the diocese, confirmed that a Canadian archbishop visited Kansas City last week to interview people about Finn’s leadership.
kansascity.com/news/local/article2303269.html
 
Megan7 said:
I do not know how to ask this:o But, when people talk or think of him in your area, is he considered an orthodox Bishop or on the other side of the spectrum?

Thanks & God bless.🙂
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From what I have read, Bishop Finn is considered quite orthodox, and that is part of the problem. He inherited a situation in the Kansas City Missouri area in which Catholic dissent was widespread. While I have not kept up with his career, or this particular case, my impression is that he did a good job of cleaning up the mess. That angered a lot of people, who wanted his scalp.

The scalpers got their chance when a rogue priest was discovered to have indecent photos of kids on his laptop. The bishop apparently consulted someone on the police force who was also a parishioner, and was told that the photos were not child porn and thus not reportable. Nevertheless, the bishop immediately removed the priest from contact with children.

When other pictures were found later, the bishop was charged with a misdemeanor failure to report suspicion of child abuse, to which he acquiesced.

In the meantime, from reports I have read in the K.C. Star, now a man is suing the diocese for damages for failing to stop him from being abused by a priest 40 years ago. The priest he alleges to have abused him is dead. The bishop who was head of the diocese at the time is dead. The Star seems to report on this case frequently.

From what I’ve seen, the Star has a long standing anti-Catholic bias, a dislike for orthodox bishops, and a columnist who also displays anti-Catholic bias. That’s my impression anyway. From what I’ve heard, the prosecutor in the both these cases has been anti-Catholic for a long time.

If the bishop had been a minimally orthodox, liberal bishop, this case would have far less media attention.

Yes, my own bias is showing as well. I think the KC media, especially the newspaper is quite hostile to the bishop and to the Catholic Church in general.

It is worth noting that K.C. Mo. is home of the National Catholic Reporter.
 
JimG said:
Nevertheless, the bishop immediately removed the priest from contact with children.

When other pictures were found later, the bishop was charged with a misdemeanor failure to report suspicion of child abuse, to which he acquiesced.
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Prior to this incident Bishop Finn had agreed in a prior lawsuit to immediately turn over all suspected abusers to civil authorities, in future incidents. An arbitrator awarded an additional million dollars to the settlement for his failure to turn Father Ratigan to civil authorities.

Father Ratigan is serving 50 years in a federal prison for child porn.

kansascity.com/news/local/article1225077.html
 
Finn violated his diocese’ own rules own child protection. He should have the decency to ask forgiveness and resign as bishop.
 
JimG said:
He inherited a situation in the Kansas City Missouri area in which Catholic dissent was widespread. While I have not kept up with his career, or this particular case, my impression is that he did a good job of cleaning up the mess.
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Can you give some detail of the “mess”? Sources?
 
Here are some references. I think the dissidents may well end up getting Bishop Finn’s head on a platter, simply because everything he does from here forward will be referenced back to this controversy, making diocesan leadership impossible.

Criticisms of Bishop Finn described as Misleading, Dishonest

New Catholic Bishop of KC Worries Dissenting Establishment

In the Matter of Bishop Robert Finn

The Campaign to Discredit Bishop Finn is Not Going to Stop

article about Rebecca Randles, plaintiff’s attorney in Church suit
 
robertmidwest said:
catholickey.org/2014/03/06/bishop-raymond-james-boland-1932-2014/

This is an obit, so I know it not a truly objective article. My point is to look at the prioritiesof Finn’s predecessor:

Evangalization, Catholic Education, Vocations, Zero tolerance of sex offenders.

Where is the “mess” that Finn needed to clean up?
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These were many of the same priorities Benedict had – it doesn’t follow the Church today is in perfect, tip-top shape.

A bishop is only one man, and cleaning up a Church (if one is in fact in need of cleaning) takes a long time.
 
I have never lived in the diocese, so I only know what I read or hear. I am not going to say anything negative about the prior bishops because I do not know them. But what I have heard is that the diocese had become a hotbed of dissent, and one in which dissenters had a good deal of influence. Perhaps the dissenters took their cues from the National Catholic Reporter rather than their bishop. I certainly do not think that Bishop Boland or Bishop Sullivan approved dissent, but they were perhaps more easy going than Bishop Finn.

Here is a blog from July 2007:
dustofthetime.blogspot.com/2007/07/scorecard-for-kansas-city-bishops.html

Here is the Curmudgeon’s Cave blog
curmudgeonkc.blogspot.com/2006/05/marthas-story.html

which reprints another persons reaction to a NCR story about Bishop Finn (Martha’s Story.) It is really too long and rambling, but I do get the idea that previous diocesan administrations had not give the dissenters much to worry about. Many were not happy about his appointment, as he was considered too traditional and conservative, and the NCR carred many negative stories about Bishop Finn from the start.
 
JimG said:
I am not going to say anything negative about the prior bishops because I do not know them.
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You already did.
JimG said:
He inherited a situation in the Kansas City Missouri area in which Catholic dissent was widespread. While I have not kept up with his career, or this particular case, my impression is that he did a good job of cleaning up the mess. That angered a lot of people, who wanted his scalp.
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robertmidwest said:
You already did.
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I said that based on what I had read, Bishop Finn inherited a situation in which dissent was widespread in the diocese. I have no personal knowledge of that. And one can inherit a bad situation without blaming a prior bishop. Nothing I have read blamed the prior bishops. One can note widespread dissent in a diocese without placing blame on a bishop. I suspect there were a number of factors at work.
 
What have we pew-parking Catholics done about ANY of this decades-old mess? Next to nothing, considering an estimated 3 billion >cha-ching< has been expended in hush money. Why? Because AmChurch is big business, and the venal Democratic machine politicos in places like Kansas City, Portland, Scranton, and Chicago where a cabal of banksters+cops+unions+tenured brainwashers+presstitutes buddy up with churchianity and all that untaxed cash. These snake pits where the abuse and cover-up shuffle has been most rampant funnel cash to partners in slime. Pope Francis has tried to unplug the Mafia and money laundering from the Vatican Bank, and it will be a miracle if he doesn’t go the way of the mob-busting Kennedys.

The pious Bishop Finn and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph were already under a court-ordered agreement to stand and deliver any diocesan personnel suspected of the sexual abuse of minors. Finn broke his word hiding Father Shawn Ratigan and was fined a million and change. The diocesan board administering this program had a police official who helped conceal Ratigan’s kiddie porn as discovered by a computer technician, and they thought they could skate hiding him away at a semi-rural retreat house. Excuse? “I was told it was THREE pictures of kiddie genitals, not THREE HUNDRED!”

Ratigan simply didn’t stay put and got outed, and received 27 state-type years. Public outrage led to federal charges that earned Ratigan his actuarial lifetime in the crossbars hotel. Ratigan got a break from Finn but refused to stay away from kids with abuse occurring after the diocese found out. It took an army of St. Louis lawyers to keep Bishop Finn out of jail but he is on probation. It would be doing him a favor to remove him from office to ease the scrutiny that could land him in jail.

The uber-liberal Kansas City Star is to be commended for ragging on clerical pedophiles even before Finn when liberal priests in pinstriped suits were running the chancery. These bureaucrats did their job in filing away every complaint against Ratigan and others and lawsuits will entangle these do-nothings who never responded. The principal for the parish school where Ratigan served constantly voiced concerns over his unseemly behavior, but she’s just a girl, and boys will be boys with tricked-out motorcycles that appeal to the young’uns like Ratigan’s candy-apple red three-wheeled Harley. This was on top of the multi-decade case of playing diocesan hide-and-go-seek with a pedophile priest that spawned the original strictures.

Finn’s Cathedral parish has been financially starved to death by incredibly angry humans who felt betrayed by Bishop Finn. This voting with their dollars is indicative of deep-seated disgust with Finn, a holy man notwithstanding his blind spot regarding hairy bear pedophiles. But you, Mr. & Ms. Catholic, didn’t raise a stink when the Dallas Charter gave a sincere apology and a golden parachute plan for pederasts. You didn’t pipe up when the USCCB’s lay committee on clerical sexual abusers was packed with mugs like two pro-abortion Clinton Democrats and a pro-pedophilia Johns-Hopkins psycho-doc who defended his sex clinic’s refusal to report active pedophiles to the state of Maryland. You did blame those lying kids.

What a racket. Don’t want to endanger the floor buffing contract, or the hand towel account, or the banking favoritism, or the union window washing, or the brick order for the new church; or worse yet jeopardize that AmChurch laissez-faire privilege lavishly extended to toxic anti-Catholic Democrats? You let 'em skate. You’re still letting 'em skate. >cha-ching<

There is a control group just across the Missouri River that confirms this Democratic RICO-worthy collusion. Want to know where Kansas City, Kansas, clerical pedophiles “directly” go? No, it isn’t to a retreat house… HINT: It’s a Republican state.👍
 
JimG said:
Here is a summary of the current situation by Dr. Jeff Mirus at Catholic Culture.org dated Sep. 30th, 2014.

catholicculture.org/commentary/otc.cfm?id=1237
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This was a pretty good article. There are two things I would like to make points on.

Calling the Finn’s involvemnet with the Fr. Ratigan scandal only tangential is misleading. In 2008 Finn signed an agreement, as part of another civil suit, that all suspected abusers in the future would be turned over to civil authorities. When the Ratigan scandal started in in 2010 and Bishop Finn continued to try to handle the problem in house instead of following the court ordered protocol (that he agreed to) he basically threw everyone a middle finger. For some reason he felt he was above the law. That is a little more than tangentially caught up.

I do not know any of the detail of the situation with Jude Huntz. Even after reading the article I don’t know any detail. The author makes vague accusations without citing examples or sources.
 
Coatimundi said:
The National Catholic Reporter has a certain reputation, which may make them a less than desirable news source for discussion here. Moreover, a year ago Bishop Finn publicly rebuked the NCR, which is headquartered in his diocese.

I am not saying that the National Catholic Reporter’s coverage will be biased, however, the specter of that bias will be raised. So I would like to add another news source regarding this story:

**Vatican examines KC Bishop Robert Finn’s leadership, diocese confirms **

The Vatican dispatched a church official this month to Kansas City to examine the leadership of Catholic Bishop Robert Finn, a spokesman for the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese said Monday.

Jack Smith, communications director for the diocese, confirmed that a Canadian archbishop visited Kansas City last week to interview people about Finn’s leadership.
kansascity.com/news/local/article2303269.html
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When you say “the National Catholic Reporter has a certain reputation,” I’m not sure what you are referring to. I perused their website, and I found many articles related to helping the poor, pointing out societal injustices, and also an honest discussion of what the Church must do to right the wrong of child sexual abuse.
 
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