“I’d love to know,” wrote Damian Thompson in his Telegraph blog a week or two ago, “if various media organisations have decided which paedophile scandal they’ll unveil to coincide with the papal visit. And will they produce their headlines just before the trip… or as the Pope’s plane lands on the tarmac? I suppose we’ll just have to wait to find out.”
I think we’re all a bit nervous about that: that’s why I’ve been writing blogs to try and get it into people’s heads that though of course clerical abuse of minors is utterly indefensible (and the handling of the problem by far too many bishops equally so), nevertheless this is a problem which is characteristic not of the Catholic Church but of modern society as a whole.
