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Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley has told the CBS television program “60 Minutes” that the status of Kansas City’s Bishop Robert Finn-- who has been convicted of endangering children because of his failure to report abuse charges-—is “a question that the Holy See needs to address urgently.”

Funny - wasn't it yesterday that we learned about the dismissal of Bishop Livieres, head of the Paraguayan diocese of Ciudad del Este.? Livieres is only suspected of protecting a priest!

Maybe it's different in the United States. After all, concerning two lawsuits alleging papal oversight of the abuse scandal, the Holy See's legal team argued that

....there has been no factual determination that the priest who committed the abuse is an employee of the Holy See. Without a showing of the priest's employment by the Holy See, there is no jurisdiction. In fact, Father [Andrew] Ronan was a priest of a religious order, the Friar Servants of Mary. In our view, the indicators of employment simply are not present. The Holy See did not pay the salary of the priest or provide his benefits or exercise day-to-day control over him or have any other connection with him indicating the presence of an employment relationship. This priest was a member of the Friar Servants of Mary. His very existence was unknown to the Holy See until after all the events in question. I do not believe that the plaintiff has any information to contradict that view....
....The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act is built upon the existence of certain precise exceptions. Here, the required exception is that the priest be an "employee" of the Holy See. This is simply factually inaccurate. Prior to this time, the case has been about whether the plaintiff's complaint was "adequate." Now the question is whether there are any facts to support the plaintiff's complaint....
.... One of the most important parts of that defense is to help people understand that the Church is not a monolith. It is composed of different entities that operate with relative autonomy and make their own decisions about the hiring and firing of personnel. Thus, just because a priest is a member of a religious order, it does not make him an employee of the Holy See.
-- from the thread Defending the Holy See [Vatican Lawyer Discusses the Supreme Court’s Decline of Abuse Appeal]

So how can the pope dismiss a bishop for failure to act, unless the bishop is in the pope's employ? And if the bishop is in the pope's employ, and the priest is admitted to be in the bishop's employ, doesn't the legal team's argument evaporate?

It's an interesting question. Nobody at the Holy See provides the Bishop any benefits, gives him job-orders, buys or sell goods, has any sort of civil contract with him, remunerates him for any kind of goods or services, pays the Bishop's salary, oversees his budget, has any control over his day-to-day operations, and may never have seen him. It's hard to see how he's an "employee" under those conditions.

On the other hand, the Holy See can fire him.

The bishop isn't a partner, a franchisee, a subsidiary, I can't even think of an analogy. Can you?

So how can the pope dismiss a bishop for failure to act, unless the bishop is in the pope's employ?

The same way the Church at Antioch sent forth Paul and Barnabas while Paul himself sent Timothy to Ephesus. Neither Paul nor Barnabas were in the employ of the Church at Antioch, neither was Timothy Paul's employee, yet authority was exercised.

This concept causes consternation to American lawyers who file lawsuits against the Vatican and quite a few Freepers too, apparently, since they unthinkingly accept the assumption that the American business model can be extrapolated universally to all organizations, including religious ones, as well as throughout the past and into the future. The Church is not AT&T or General Motors.

There are situations in which authority can be exercised which do not involve the employer/employee relationship, the most obvious being the parent/child relationship but the ecclesiastical superior/subordinate is another. The Church does indeed employ people....organists, janitors, office workers etc. However, bishops are no more employees of the Pope than Timothy was Paul's employee.