We'd rather not hear from last year's bad newsmakers | Feature | The Pitch

 

A new year should be a new beginning. But 2014's baggage weighs heavy as we try to push into 2015.

So we've made a list — a special list, a wish list — of the people and organizations we'd love to leave in the past. It's not that the inept, the perverse and the just plain mean don't sometimes amuse us. And we aren't saying we'll never forgive certain corrupt or morally suspect people. It's just that we'd rather they went away and let the healing begin. We know that most of them won't oblige us, but we're determined to start 2015 fresh anyway by saying our own goodbyes to these 2014 bums and bummers.

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Bishop Robert Finn

If you work for a Catholic institution in northwest Missouri, you report to the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official to be convicted in a sex-abuse scandal: Bishop Robert Finn. This is a man who, when presented with evidence that a priest in his diocese had a laptop containing hundreds of pornographic images of underage girls, elected to reassign the priest to a convent rather than report his criminal behavior to authorities. When the truth came out, Finn was found guilty of a misdemeanor for failing to report child abuse and was sentenced to two years' probation.

It's shocking enough that a man who shielded a pedophile from the law could be in charge of any organization. But for Finn to still be leading the Diocese of Kansas City–St. Joseph — an entity already stained by decades of sexual-abuse allegations, for which it has paid out millions of dollars in settlements to victims — is mind-boggling.

And Finn is still doing terrible things. He fired Colleen Simon, a food-pantry coordinator at St. Francis Xavier Church, after a Kansas City Star story about Troost's revitalization mentioned in passing that Simon is a lesbian. (Simon has since filed a lawsuit against Finn and the diocese.)

There are indications that Finn may not last much longer at his post. The Vatican is reportedly conducting an internal investigation of Finn. Cardinal Sean O'Malley, a close aide to Pope Francis, appeared on 60 Minutes in November and declared that the Finn situation was something the Pope needed to "address urgently." Meanwhile, our hands are hovering over our keyboards, waiting to type the word "former" in front of "Bishop Robert Finn" someday.

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