Was the Vatican's just-completed summit on child sex abuse, convened by Pope Francis amid a crisis of credibility that has crippled the Catholic Church's moral authority, really intended simply to prepare the way for genuine reforms in the indefinite future? Victims' groups had hoped for much more, as had many of the faithful in the United States and elsewhere. They were heartened, briefly, when the pope opened the unprecedented four-day conference by demanding what he called "concrete" measures to deliver something real that would uproot the scourge of clerical sex abuse and hierarchical coverup.
In the end, those concrete measures were a chimera — widely debated, held up to intense canonical scrutiny, but ultimately put off to some future date. The contrast with the pope's own words could not have been sharper, or more disappointing.
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