(2 of 2)
The correct response to all this may well be: too damned bad. Protecting children is more important. But at least these considerations ought to make us appreciate the dilemma of having officially designated bad guys.
The Roman Catholic Church is far and away America's biggest social-service agency. As such it does a tremendous amount of good: tending the sick, feeding the hungry, counseling the troubled and running a school system that is the envy of secular educators public and private. So what were Boston's Bernard Cardinal Law and other church officials thinking when they covered up sexual abuse of boys and girls by priests and allowed the offenders to start again in new parishes with fresh, unaware victims?
Maybe they were thinking that God works in mysterious ways and that all this good work may depend in part on people who are doing good for bad reasons. Maybe they were thinking that protecting the church's supply of such necessary people involves a trade-off, a balancing of considerations. There is no question that Law and his colleagues got the balance badly wrong. But at least we should try to understand why they may have thought there was one. Understand, and maybe even sympathize a bit.
Michael Kinsley is founding editor of Slate.com