Reaping The Whirlwind: Stephen Den Beste has a great post on what's afoot now that civil authorities are paying closer attention to the possibility that the Catholic Church might have violated the law when it covered up instances of priestly pedophilia.
We now know that two-thirds of Catholics disapprove of the Bishop's decisions in Dallas last week, something that three quarters of Americans in general also feel. In Dallas, the Bishops had one last chance to make a dramatic and public act of contrition that would have both expressed remorse for their actions in the past, as well as set them on the road to reforming the Church and its practices. It should be clear now that as a PR exercise, Dallas was a failure. And now, come the civil authorities, irked that the laws they are charged with upholding have been so cavalierly ignored.
The Church is in even deeper trouble now. I have little doubt that a flurry of grand jury investigations will find evidence of far more cases than have been discovered to date.
