…has good things to say about the audit.

There doubtless will be mistakes up there on the housetop. New games and new rules are hard to learn. Yet the charter and the audit suggest a major turning point in the history of the Catholic hierarchy in this country. They might not have wanted an audit by laymen, commissioned by a lay board, but their leaders were smart enough to know that it had to be, and the others went along, if in some cases only because they had no real choice.

It is a measure of the justified anger of the victims of abuse that they issued a strong critique of the audit before they could have read it and thus earned themselves equal billing in the media — whether their critique was valid or not. It is a measure of the bishops’ lack of credibility that they are subject to such hostile spins on their work. Those among them who think they can now go beyond the sexual abuse crisis are kidding only themselves. Their credibility as a group is still at ground zero. If they continue their project of hassling the laity about birth control and Catholic politicians about gays, they will run the risk of being dismissed once more as hypocrites. The audit is both a step to making the church safer for kids and a step in rehabilitating their credibility as religious leaders.