Berkley Center

Paul Elie investigates the Catholic Church's efforts to deal with the toxic legacy of priestly sexual abuse by means of independent reconciliation-and-compensation programs. Drawing on interviews with key clerical and lay leaders and his own experience as a lifelong Catholic, he wonders whether the Catholic Church today is essentially outsourcing a reckoning with its past. Elie concludes that nothing is more corrosive to this faith than the drawn-out spectacle of a Church that shrinks from the truth about its history. This article appears in the print edition of the April 15, 2019, issue of the New Yorker, with the headline “Acts of Penance.”