The campaign to discredit Bishop Finn is not going to stop

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 30, 2013

Bishop snared in abuse scandal criticizes Catholic newspaper

That was the headline for a Los Angeles Times story on Bishop Robert Finn’s statement that the National Catholic Reporter does not deserve to be described as a “Catholic” publication.

The gist of the story, as the Times reports it, is that the bishop “wishes the independent National Catholic Reporter weren't so independent." Nowhere does the story mention the crux of the matter. Under the canon law that governs the Catholic Church, an institution cannot identify itself as “Catholic” without the permission of the local bishop. The Reporter does not have that permission; quite the contrary. Bishop Finn, as he explained in his own diocesan newspaper, has “a responsibility as the local bishop to instruct the Faithful about the problematic nature of this media source which bears the name ‘Catholic.’” Thus his warning about the Reporter. If you read only the article in the Los Angeles Times, you learned nothing about this side of the story.

But enough about what the Times did not say. Let’s take a closer look at what the newspaper did say, beginning with that headline. Bishop Finn’s involvement in the abuse scandal was completely irrelevant to this story. But by mentioning it in the headline, and then again near the top of the article, the Times might have given some readers the impression that the bishop had denounced the Reporter to gain his revenge, since the Reporter had called for his resignation, or to silence a paper which has aggressively explored the clerical sex-abuse scandal. In fact, as he explained in his column, Bishop Finn was taking issue with the Reporter’s handling of entirely different issues, including women’s ordination, contraception, and theological dissent in general.

Bishop Finn was not “snared” on abuse charges himself; he was convicted on a misdemeanor charge for failing to report evidence of abuse by a priest in his diocese. So the wording of the headline in the LA Times is harsh. But it is not inaccurate. Bishop Finn has undoubtedly been caught up in the snares of the sex-abuse scandal. And therein lies the problem.

Having been found guilty in a court of law, and then having accepted the court’s verdict, Bishop Finn is now permanently handicapped as a teacher of the Catholic faith. The Los Angeles Times is not the first newspaper that has chosen to focus attention on his criminal conviction, nor will it be the last. Whenever he makes a public statement on a controversial issue, critics will be sure to remind us of the bishop’s troubles with the law, whether or not they are relevant to the issue at hand.

It may be unfair that Bishop Finn is now singled out as a convicted criminal, when so many other American bishops were guilty of the same offenses, and much worse, in the past. It may be unfair that the Los Angeles Times trains its editorial guns on the Bishop of Kansas City, when there is larger target at close range in Los Angeles. It may be unfair, but those are the facts. When an orthodox Catholic bishop makes a strong defense of the Catholic stand on contentious issues, the critics of Catholicism will fight back, and Bishop Finn is now vulnerable.

As much as I admire his stalwart leadership of the Kansas City diocese, I question whether Bishop Finn can act effectively as a teacher of the faith when his critics have such a handy means of impeaching his testimony. I question whether he can prosper as the leader of the Catholic community, in an increasingly hostile environment, while wearing a bulls-eye on his back.