TEN YEARS TOO LATE, BISHOPS FACE ACCOUNTABLITY AND A SACRIFICIAL LAMB IS OFFERED

Zero tolerance and over correction seem to walk hand-in-hand. I'm not sure that Bishop Finn should be as vilified as he is about his misdemeanor guilty verdict. Perhaps the Church should have some kind of censure for bishops who have done something like this but don't deserve the "death penalty" in terms of their failure or crime. But who am I to judge?

Zero tolerance and one size fits all does not seem to me to coincide with a Church of Mercy or a Church of common sense. Is Bishop Finn not to be forgiven and should there not have been as a part of some kind of censure from the Church  a public penance and reconciliation?

Is it true that Bishop Finn's traditionalism or so-called conservatism, what most right-minded Catholics would call orthodoxy, is at the root of his removal? If so then we are in big trouble in the short-run, but not in the long run.

But with that said, Philip Lawlor is far from being a progressive shrill has some common sense observations about Bishop Finn's resignation which was requested by the pope.

We have to keep in mind that the sexual abuse scandal's cause was bishops and the mess we are in today is because of bishops who did not screen seminarians properly.  I complained about this when I was in the seminary in the 1970's when my seminary was accused of having less than suitable seminarians and I said, it wasn't the seminary's fault, but the bishops' fault who sent these men to the seminary in the first place thinking the seminary was a place of therapy for broken, needy men.

But then there was an egregious mismanagement of broken priests and a la la land idea they could be cured, healed despite evidence to the contrary and the havoc they were wreaking in dioceses, parishes after parishes and people's lives.

But here is Philip Lawlor's take on Bishop Finn:

The Finn resignation: 10 years too late, bishops face accountability

By Phil Lawler | Apr 21, 2015 

Bishop Finn had to go. When he was convicted on criminal charges, he became the poster boy for the American bishops’ mishandling of the sex-abuse crisis. He was an irresistible target for critics of Catholicism: a walking, talking symbol of episcopal negligence.

The bishop’s defenders have said that he was not properly informed about the Ratigan case. That’s true, but it’s not an adequate defense. They say that his subordinates and counselors gave him bad advice. Also true, but irrelevant. We’ve heard those arguments too many times. The fact remains that when he was alerted to the fact that a troubled priest had engaged in inappropriate activities with young children, Bishop Finn did not take prompt and decisive action. He let the problem fester—as so many other bishops have let so many other problems fester—with disastrous results for everyone involved.

In Bishop Finn’s case this failure was particularly inexcusable because the results of negligence were so very well known. He could not get away with mumbling inanities about a “learning curve,” about not recognizing the severity of pedophilia, as other bishops had done a decade earlier. By 2011, every American bishop should have known that if there was one failure he absolutely must avoid, it was the failure to curb sexual abuse.

The announcement of Bishop Finn’s resignation comes, appropriately, on the same day as the news that the US bishops spent nearly $3 billion in the past decade to settle sex-abuse lawsuits. That reckoning understates the financial cost of the sex-abuse scandal, since it does not include the millions of dollars quietly paid out before 2004. And the financial cost, in turn, does not adequately summarize the staggering damage done to the Church. How many young lives were damaged? How many thousands were alienated from the faith? How many opportunities for evangelization were lost forever?

The truly remarkable thing about today’s announcement is not that Bishop Finn was forced to step down, but that he was the first American bishop forced to step down. (Cardinal Law left voluntarily in 2002; in fact when he originally submitted his resignation, it was declined.) Dozens of other bishops were as negligent, or worse. But they remained in office for years as the Church hierarchy came, ever so slowly, to the conclusion that even prelates must be held accountable.

Now that necessary conclusion has been reached. Last November, when the circumspect Cardinal Sean O’Malley told a nationwide television audience that Bishop Finn’s status was “a question that the Holy See needs to address urgently,” the embattled bishop must have known that his days as leader of the Kansas City diocese were numbered.

For the many Catholics who admire Bishop Finn’s strong defense of Catholic teaching, including myself, his case is tragic. For others who opposed his pastoral initiatives—such as the National Catholic Reporter, which, Bishop Finn had confirmed, had lost the right to describe itself as a “Catholic” publication—his departure has provided an occasion for unseemly delight. But the bishop’s staunch orthodoxy is not the issue here.

Nor has orthodoxy been the primary problem through the whole long, sad history of the sex-abuse scandal. Bishops from both the ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ wings of the US hierarchy have been exposed as negligent, or worse, in their handling of abusive priests. It is true that sympathetic reporters in the liberal secular media have spared a few prelates (Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop Weakland) from the grilling they deserved, while savaging others like Bishop Finn. Still, the bishops’ malfeasance was not caused by the media coverage; they brought the problem on themselves. And in the process they brought the problem on the faithful, on the universal Church.

In June 2002, when I attended the fateful meeting of the US bishops’ conference in Dallas, I noticed a broad consensus among the reporters in the crowded press room. Virtually all of us—liberals and conservatives, veterans and neophytes, Catholic and secular journalists—marveled together that the bishops didn’t “get it;” they did not realize that the American public saw them as the problem. It has taken more than a decade for that realization slowly to sink in. But now at last we have an unmistakable signal that the Vatican is ready to hold bishops accountable.

Many questions remain to be answered. Will other prelates follow Bishop Finn out the chancery doors? Will the critics of Catholicism pick a new target of opportunity? Will retired bishops whose negligence has been demonstrated still be treated with deference, as if nothing happened? Will Pope Francis continue to defend his appointment of a Chilean bishop accused of ignoring abuse, even as lay members of his sex-abuse commission threaten to resign?

And in the future, will bishops be held responsible for proper handling of their duties in areas other than sexual abuse? Once accountability becomes the norm, all sorts of changes are possible.