The CATHOLIC CHURCH: A Call to Repentance.

The American Catholic bishops met in Dallas on June 13-14 to consider the priest sex-abuse scandals. Their draft statement was all that was available to NR at press time, and, like many such statements, it was a mixed bag.

The Church decided to square itself with the state. The bishops pledged to report all accusations of the sex abuse of minors to the proper authorities, and to cooperate in investigating them. They also pledged to advise victims of their right to go to the cops. In essence, the Church promised to avoid behaving as a bullying and secretive in-group -- the very stuff of 19th-century nativist accusations -- and to render ununto Caesar what is Caesar's. For this reason, the bishops' draft was welcomed by prosecutors.

Did the bishops square themselves with the faithful, and with morality? At one point, their draft was naive. They want the ministerial status of priests who, in the past, abused only one minor, but who were not diagnosed as pedophiles, to be determined by a diocesan review board, with a majority of laymen. But how many molesters strike only once? La Rochefoucauld said that some women have no affairs, but none have just one. The same is true of child molesters.

The priest sex scandals implicate more than the wicked priests who are at fault. A selfish and blinkered hierarchy protected these men, and passed them around like counterfeit money. The bishops are now vowing not to arrange weaselly confidentiality agreements, or to prettify the resumes of offending priests. But no one, in the bishops' proposed reforms, guards the guardians, and none of the culpable princes of the Church has been called to account. Bernard Cardinal Law, the enabler of the odious Fr. Paul Shanley, still holds his archbishopric, as do others, equally at fault. No one said a word about the gay-bar culture of some seminaries.

American Catholic laymen have not gotten much help from Rome. La Civilta Cattolica, a Roman Jesuit journal, blames the whole scandal on Catholic-bashing journalists. So does Oscar Cardinal Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, a possible successor to John Paul II, who said rascally newspapermen were persecuting the Church in America, in the manner of Nero, Hitler, and Stalin. No, your Eminence: Those men murdered Catholics. The problem in America is that priests have been raping Catholics. No doubt the Boston Globe and the New York Times have been pleased to stick it to an old and favorite enemy. Too bad the Catholic hierarchy has been doing their work for them. The strongest cries for love and justice are coming from the pews, not the press; and they are directed not just at the offending priests, but at the bishops.