A newspaper known for unflinching coverage of the Catholic church
scandal was rebuked by a bishop in its own backyard after calling for
his ouster in a battle that illustrates tensions between U.S. bishops
and groups that call themselves Catholic but aren't sanctioned by the
church.
The National Catholic Reporter, an independent Kansas
City, Mo.-based weekly, called for Bishop Robert Finn's removal or
resignation in September, after he was convicted of failing to report
suspected child abuse.
Finn, leader of the Roman Catholic
Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, later wrote in an editorial in his
own diocesan newspaper that parishioner anger is growing over the NCR's
challenges to Catholic orthodoxy on topics ranging from the ordination
of women to contraception.
In the last several years, church
leaders have been trying to shore up the religious identity and mission
of organizations that call themselves Catholic, including trying to bar
groups from saying they have ties with the church if bishops believe the
organizations stray from church teaching. Conflict over the issue
intensified in the 2008 presidential election, when some Catholic
advocacy groups backed Barack Obama despite his support for abortion
rights.
Finn, who declined to be interviewed by The Associated
Press, wrote in his editorial that a local bishop first asked the paper
to remove Catholic from its name in 1968 — "to no avail."
"In
light of the number of recent expressions of concern, I have a
responsibility as the local bishop to instruct the Faithful about the
problematic nature of this media source which bears the name
'Catholic,'" Finn wrote in The Catholic Key. "While I remain open to
substantive and respectful discussion with the legitimate
representatives of NCR, I find that my ability to influence the National
Catholic Reporter toward fidelity to the Church seems limited to the
supernatural level."
Thomas Groome, professor of religious
education at Boston College, said he was surprised Finn was "picking
such a public fight." Finn is the highest-ranking U.S. church official
convicted of a crime related to the sex abuse scandal. The misdemeanor
charge stemmed from the case of an area priest who pleaded guilty in
August to producing child pornography. Finn and other church officials
knew about photos on the priest's computer six months before they turned
him in.
Groome said the Catholic Church benefits from publications such as the National Catholic Reporter.
"There
are all kinds of ways the church's position has evolved, and if that's
to happen you need publications like the NCR that raises critical
issues, controversial issues, and I think it does that respectfully with
a sense of faithfulness to the church's core teaching," he said.
NCR,
founded in Kansas City in 1964, has been widely lauded for its coverage
of the church and garnered widespread recognition for its reporting on
child sex abuse in the 1980s. The newspaper, which has a circulation of
about 35,000 and is available online, has won several awards from the
Catholic Press Association, including for general excellence for 13
straight years. The CPA, while independent, works closely with church
hierarchy, according to Timothy Walter, CPA's executive director.
"We
don't present official teaching, and we don't pretend to," said the
newspaper's editor, Dennis Coday. "What we do is report on what's
happening in the church. And part of what's happening is dissent and
questioning, and that's what we report about. And that's why we remain
Catholic and continue to call ourselves Catholic."
Coday said
the question for the paper is: "Are we upholding the deepest values set
out in the Gospel, the message Jesus preached?"
Finn is not
alone in complaining about NCR, which has also called for the church to
reverse its teaching on women's ordination and supported re-examining
the church's approaches to contraception and sexuality.
Canon
lawyer Edward Peters, the Vatican's expert witness in U.S. sex abuse
lawsuits and an adviser to the Vatican's highest court, said in a recent
blog post that Finn was "too kind" in his remarks about NCR and noted
that other groups have stopped using "Catholic" in their names.
Peters
said the newspaper has carried on "a steady tirade against
ecclesiastical authority in general, and against numerous Church
teachings in particular, for several decades."
"But the last few years have seen a shrillness that should discomfort even its dwindling number of friends," Peters wrote.
The
tension between NCR and Finn likely won't resolve easily because it's
tied to an ongoing battle over authority in the church, said the Rev.
Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at
Georgetown University.
"The vision of the Vatican and the
hierarchy is that the Catholic media should support and ... promote the
positions taken by the hierarchy," said Reese, who was removed from his
position as editor of the Jesuit magazine America in 2005 after it
published stories on topics including gay marriage.
"But you
know," Reese said, "many people in the Catholic media think that they
should also criticize those positions or be a forum where there can be
discussion and argument and dialogue on issues facing the church."