UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By Editorial Board March 6

ON THE same day Hollywood conferred its most prestigious prize on “Spotlight,” the newsroom drama about the Boston Globe’s reporting on the Catholic Church’s complicity in the sexual abuse of children by priests, a related drama was unfolding near the Vatican itself. For hours, Cardinal George Pell, the Holy See’s treasurer and one of its top-ranking clerics, answered questions posed by an Australian commission that quizzed the cardinal on the extent of his knowledge about pedophile priests he knew decades ago.

Cardinal Pell, the most senior Australian Catholic, stayed mainly on message, the message from the Vatican for years having been one of carefully couched contrition in the face of incontrovertible evidence that the church enabled and covered up for sex abuse by clergy. “I’m not here to defend the indefensible,” said the cardinal.

But under polite and sustained grilling,…