The American bishops of the Catholic Church selected a National Review Board of laymen to investigate the "causes and context" of the sexual-abuse scandal.

* The American bishops of the Catholic Church selected a National Review Board of laymen to investigate the "causes and context" of the sexual-abuse scandal. The board has now issued a report that candidly confronts the scandal and sharply rebukes the Church's hierarchy. It revealed that 4,392 priests were accused of sexually abusing minors between 1950 and 2002. That is 4 percent of the priests in active ministry during that time. Eighty-one percent of the victims were male. Three-quarters were adolescents. The board concluded that "the crisis was characterized by homosexual behavior." It also found that the incidence of sexual abuse surged during the '60s and '70s, when "some seminaries yielded to a culture of sexual permissiveness and moral relativism." The failure to prevent the scandal is thus laid at the doorstep of bishops who did not properly govern the seminaries. The board also apportioned responsibility for the failure to respond to the abuse once it happened. While many dioceses adopted appropriate policies in the '90s to deal with abuse allegations, too many bishops responded with "moral laxity, excessive leniency, insensitivity, secrecy, and neglect." Several hundred priests have been removed from ministry, but few bishops have left the episcopacy. The board's comprehensive analysis and recommendations, available at CatholicReviewBoard.com, provide little support for critics who build a case for female or married priests on the ruins of the scandal. "The problem facing the Church was not caused by Church doctrine, and the solution does not lie in questioning doctrine," the board concludes, faithfully.