Transparency is not a virtue we associate with the Vatican. It is, after all, the last of the Renaissance courts. And like all court systems, it thrives on secrecy: In the years I spent in Rome interviewing Vatican officials - usually not for attribution - it was said that a secret is something you tell one person at a time, in return for one of his secrets.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that the Holy See has released a long and institutionally painful report on ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick detailing what three successive popes were told about McCarrick's abuse of seminarians and why the first two, Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, chose not to investigate the American cardinal after hearing rumors of his routine bedding of young seminarians going back decades. At 449 pages and 1,410 footnotes, it is as if the Department of Defense had published the Pentagon Papers.
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