The greatest victims of the failures of priests and leaders in the Catholic Church are of course those whose bodies were violated and brutalized, and who were then denied justice. Yet those laymen and women who have used their public positions to praise the Church’s virtues face their own tragic moment in which their faith enters an unprecedented era of hatred and rejection.

America is not a Catholic country, so one can’t easily make analogies to societies such as those in Ireland, Spain, or Quebec, where the decline of the Church’s moral authority helped herald the secularism that defines those nations today. American secularism is a product of different variables, which has given American Catholic intellectuals a different role, since the case for their Church draws heavily on its existence as an institution admirably contrary to the predominantly Protestant character of American life.

That argument can still be made, but in the wake of scandals, it is becoming more convoluted, more rooted in faith alone, and thus less persuasive in an irreligious age when broad skepticism of Christianity is becoming increasingly mainstream.