Can the Church Be Saved?

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Devout families--and predator priests frequently chose their victims from the most ardent parishioners--had been taught for generations to exalt, respect and trust priests. Who could imagine dear Father Tim--who came to dinner, played with the kids, counseled mom, acted like a dad--would do something so sinful? Doubting the priest would cost you your spiritual security. When Ralph Sidaway told his mother roughly 65 years ago that a parish priest had molested him, "she beat the crap out of him, because you don't say that about priests," says Sheldon Stevens, a Florida lawyer who handled a case lodged by Ralph's adult son Kevin, who says he was molested by the Rev. Rocco D'Angelo as a child. The church knew it and used it to dissuade people from pressing complaints.

Nor is there any way of knowing whether the pedophile epidemic is being checked. Almost every case on record happened years ago. Even if it has grown easier for adults to reveal shameful incidents in their past, it's still hard to get young males to come forward while the abuse is going on. "The last thing I want to do as a teenager is run around telling everybody some priest gave me a b___ j__," says John Falls, a grown-up Californian who says he was molested by his boyhood priest. Says Neil Blake, a New Mexico lawyer litigating abuse cases: "I don't know if priests are still out there molesting kids, because they won't tell anyone about it. We'll find out in about 2015."

HERE COMES THE LAW

The horror stories exploding onto front pages are modifying church behavior, whether its leaders like it or not. Under duress, some bishops have scrambled to announce "zero tolerance" toward any priest, past or present, against whom allegations have been made. Up to a dozen Los Angeles priests have been quietly dismissed in recent weeks. Southern California's Orange County diocese removed the Rev. Michael Pecharich from his church in early March as soon as it substantiated a single case of abuse, which was decades old. And when Kathryn Barrett-Gaines and her sister, now in their 30s, contacted the archdiocese in Washington two weeks ago to accuse Monsignor Russell Dillard, 54, the popular pastor of the city's oldest African-American Roman Catholic congregation, of "kissing and inappropriate touching" when they were teens, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick immediately suspended his good friend. Dillard told his spiritual superior he "did not exceed the bounds of propriety" any further than "father-daughter kissing." Nevertheless, McCarrick shipped Dillard off for evaluation at a sexual-abuse clinic, informed the police of the complaint and will not let the much loved pastor return if the sisters are telling the truth.