by Patrick J. Buchanan – November 18, 2002

The meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has just ended. Dominant issue: How to cope with the gravest crisis in its history, the scandal caused by hundreds of priests who sexually abused altar boys and teen-agers in their custody and care. The bishops’ statement on the morality of war on Iraq was ignored.

To learn how a respected institution can forfeit its moral authority, one could do worse than conduct a case study of the Catholic Church in America from 1950 to today.