In my recent travels both to Europe and around North America, I have yet to meet a Catholic who expects any kind of serious reform to come from Pope Francis and the bishops who are meeting this week in Rome to discuss sex abuse in the Catholic Church. But as a careful observer of this crisis since I first began writing about it in 1992 in my native Canada, I have sensed, for the first time since the news of Theodore McCarrick broke last summer, a definitive, perhaps even revolutionary, shift among Catholics everywhere in their demands for major reform.
Gone today is any hope that the bishops—any of them—will actually do anything serious. They will talk. They will promise to do certain things, perhaps even intelligent things. But what they will not do is the one thing that is most needed: to reform the structures and offices of the Church, including their own, which have perpetuated and worsened the crisis, and which will only prolong it until and unless those offices and structures are radically reformed.
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