Missouri Bishop’s Conviction Leaves Clergy Divided
John Eligon and Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times report on Bishop Robert Finn, the first to be convicted of failing to report a pedophile priest. After the verdict, lay people called for his resignation, but now the reporters found a “significant number of the bishop’s own priests have lost confidence in him.” They write, “Such sentiments raise the question of whether Bishop Finn can successfully continue to oversee a diocese of 87 parishes and more than 130,000 people, or whether he will go the way of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who gave up his post in Boston a decade ago after an outcry over his practice of reassigning priests accused of abuse to new parishes.”