The following story, from 2006, describes how Bishop Robert Finn completely upended the Kansas City- St Joseph diocese when he took over. The authoritarian attitude and disregard for the people of the diocese was perhaps a harbinger of the future attitude toward protecting Fr. Shawn Ratigan from disclosure which has now won the bishop and the diocese criminal indictments and numerous civil suits.
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By DENNIS CODAY
Kansas City, Mo.
May 12, 2006
Perhaps nowhere in America has the transition from a church focused on social engagement and lay empowerment to one more concerned with Catholic identity and evangelization been more dramatic, or in some ways more wrenching, than in the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocese since the appointment of Bishop Robert Finn.
Finn has brought the diocese, for decades a model of the former category of church practice, to a screeching halt and sent it veering off in a new direction, leaving nationally heralded education programs and high-profile lay leaders and women religious with long experience abandoned and dismayed.
The competing tensions in the U.S. church were outlined last year by Bishop Joseph Fiorenza of the Galveston-Houston archdiocese in an interview with NCR. In Fiorenza’s analysis, bishops in the past emphasized Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) document on the church and the world, while many of the younger bishops are emphasizing Lumen Gentium or Dei Verbum, Vatican documents on eccelesiology and revelation, respectively. In real life, of course, the split is never that neat, but practically it can mean a general refocusing of church efforts from large social issues and themes and concern about church reform to issues of Catholic identity, of catechesis, of adherence to stricter standards regarding liturgy and of faithful transmission of church teachings.
Finn has not used those categories to explain his actions, but the contrast between what has been and what he is putting in place could not be more striking. If, as Fiorenza suggested, that transition is one of the more important dramas unfolding in American Catholicism at the moment, in Kansas City it’s occurring at light speed.
Finn, 53, a priest of the St. Louis archdiocese and a member of the conservative Opus Dei movement, was named coadjutor of the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese in March 2004. The diocese comprises 130,000 Catholics in 27 countries of northwest Missouri. He succeeded Bishop Raymond Boland as ordinary on May 24, 2005. Within a week of his appointment he:
•Dismissed the chancellor, a layman with 21 years of experience in the diocese, and the vice chancellor, a religious woman stationed in the diocese for nearly 40 years and the chief of pastoral planning for the diocese since 1990, and replaced them with a priest chancellor.
•Cancelled the diocese’s nationally renowned lay formation programs and a master’s degree program in pastoral ministry.
•Cut in half the budget of the Center for Pastoral Life and Ministry, effectively forcing the almost immediate resignation of half the seven-member team. Within 10 months all seven would be gone and the center shuttered.
•Ordered a “zero-based study” of adult catechesis in the diocese and appointed as vice chancellor to oversee adult catechesis, lay formation and the catechesis study a layman with no formal training in theology or religious studies.
•Ordered the editor of the diocesan newspaper to immediately cease publishing columns by Notre Dame theologian Fr. Richard McBrien.
•Announced that he would review all front page stories, opinion pieces, columns and editorials before publication.
By most accounts, he reached these decisions without consulting any of the senior leadership of the diocese or the people in the programs affected. Virtually no one on the chancery staff knew of the changes until they were announced at a news conference two days after his appointment. Many parish staffs and priests would first learn of the changes when they read about them in the local or diocesan newspaper.
On the last day of work for the dismissed chancellor and vice chancellor and two members of the ministry center, people from across the diocese sent flowers and chancery support staff wore black as a sign of solidarity -- and mourning.
As his first year in office unfolded and as budgets were prepared for a new fiscal year, the new bishop’s priorities emerged:
•The budget of the Office of Peace and Justice was cut in half. One of two full-time staff positions was eliminated, and the other may be reduced.
•Support of the Diocesan Bolivian Mission, a relationship established with the La Paz archdiocese in 1963, was cut from $50,000 annually to $10,000 annually. Fr. Michael Gillgannon, the diocesan priest missioned to Bolivia since 1974, learned of the cut while home on leave in April.
•The Vocation Office went from a part-time priest vocation director to a full-time priest vocation director with a part-time priest assistant and additional support from the head of the newly established Office for Consecrated Life.
•A separate Respect Life Office was established to handle pro-life issues and battle stem-cell research.
•The diocesan-sponsored master’s program, administered for eight years by the Aquinas Institute of Theology, a Dominican school affiliated with Jesuit-run St. Louis University, was transferred to the Institute for Pastoral Theology at Florida-based Ave Maria University. Ave Maria is being developed by former Domino’s Pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan, who has funded a host of conservative Catholic efforts.
Finn upgraded a Latin Mass community, which has been meeting in a city parish, to a parish in its own right and appointed himself pastor. ( See accompanying story.) Later, he asked the parish that the Latin Mass community will be leaving to donate $250,000 of the estimated $1.5 million the Latin group needs to renovate the old church Finn gave them.
The new bishop “came with an agenda,” said Fr. Richard Carney, a priest for more than 50 years and a respected leader in the diocese. “He didn’t ask us who we are and what we are about. He looked at it from the vantage point of a coadjutor bishop and made decisions of what he was going to do about us. … Well, we’re not used to that kind of authoritarianism,” he said. “It didn’t show much respect for prior bishops who established it that way,” Carney said. “We feel beaten up.”
A lack of respect -- some say total disregard -- for what has been developed in the diocese during the past half-century was one of the foremost complaints among many in the diocese upset to find highly regarded structures and programs gone.
full story at National Catholic Reporter
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