A large part of what God has asked of me as a priest is to accompany hurting people, and particularly hurting Catholics. And much of my life as a priest has been spent dealing with the fallout of an institutional Church that became a haven for sexual predators, and whose shepherds cultivated a decades-long culture of denial, unfathomable inaction, and cover-up.

If the Church today finds itself in a perilously unstable condition—the doctrinal tribalism of the self-consciously Catholic, the gradual attrition of “none”–leaning nominal Catholics, the lack of vocations, the financial bankruptcy of dioceses, and so on—the Church’s crisis of clergy sexual abuse has largely contributed to our current sorry state. While there is some hard data out there to support this contention,[1] I say this simply because I have seen it in the lives of the Catholics I serve, as have hundreds of my brother priests. Although certain that every day…