Religion & Law

If you haven't read this weekend's assessment by the New York Times' public editor of the newspaper's coverage of Pope Benedict and the sex abuse crisis, you should.  (The conclusion -- Surprise! -- is that the paper has behaved responsibly.)  I still think Ross Douthat has had the best and most concise advice:

I think the last month?s worth of press coverage would have played out very differently if Rome had greeted the [original Munich] story, not with circle-the-wagon defensiveness, but with a clear, ?bucks stop here? statement from the pope that 1) took responsibility, as the head of the Munich archdiocese at the time, for mistakes made by his subordinates, 2) acknowledged that the Vatican bureaucracy had been too slow, in the past, to reckon with the crisis, and 3) summarized in detail the labor that?s been done during this pontificate to come to grips with the scandals. . . .