UNITED STATES
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

David Clohessy

Last week, while many Catholic eyes were focused on new and hopeful moves to streamline the home office, the supervisors in the field offices were focused on very old and depressing moves to do what’s long been done: ignore, conceal, and “spin” child sex crimes and cover-ups.

And while in Rome all seems to have gone swimmingly, in US chancery offices all hell was breaking loose.

In St. Paul, a police report surfaced saying that St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese staff withheld evidence of likely child porn and now the alleged sex offender can’t be criminally charged. (And in the wake of a different but new child sex scandal there, the vicar general also stepped down this week.)

In Trenton, Bishop David O’Connell essentially admits that, for months, he has hidden the fact that one of his priests sent 1,200 inappropriate…