Finn came to the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese as a co-adjutor bishop in March 2004.
He was then a 53-year-old St. Louis priest and member of the conservative Opus Dei movement. He had served as a high school principal and oversaw the St. Louis archdiocesan newspaper.
Finn succeeded Bishop Raymond Boland as the diocese's leader on May 24, 2005. Within a week of his appointment he:
- Dismissed the chancellor, a layman with 21 years of experience in the diocese; 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. He replaced them with a priest chancellor.
- Cancelled the diocese’s nationally renowned lay formation programs and a master’s degree program in pastoral ministry.
- Halved 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, and announced he would review all front-page stories, opinion pieces, columns and editorials before publication.
By most accounts, Finn reached these decisions without consulting any of the senior leadership of the diocese or the people in the programs affected. Virtually no staff at the diocesan headquarters knew of the changes until they were announced at a news conference two days after his appointment.
Many parish staff members and priests would first learn of the changes when they read about them in the local or diocesan newspaper.
As his first year in office unfolded and as budgets were prepared for a new fiscal year, the new bishop’s priorities emerged.
Budgets for the peace and justice office and Bolivian missions were cut in half and more. A diocesan sponsored master’s program was transferred from the Aquinas Institute of Theology, a Dominican school affiliated with Jesuit-run St. Louis University, to the Institute for Pastoral Theology at Florida-based Ave Maria University.
A Latin Mass community, which had been using a city parish for liturgies, was given a parish in its own right and Finn appointed himself pastor. Later, he asked the parish that the Latin Mass community would be leaving to donate $250,000 of the estimated $1.5 million the Latin group needed to renovate the old church Finn gave them.
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