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out perpetrators. “Only after six years of discussion—in 1994—did Rome grant the U.S. bishops a longer statute: ten years after the victim turns eighteen,” writes Nicholas P. Cafardi, a canon law scholar.18 Had John Paul granted the 1989 request, and if American bishops had used it, defrocking men rather than cycling them through treatment facilities, the scandal’s scope and titanic losses might have been contained. Instead, for twelve years, bishops sent files on the worst offenders to an array of offices and congregations in Rome, among them Clergy, Doctrine of the Faith, the dicastery that oversaw religious orders, the Secretariat of State, and the Apostolic Signatura, or high court. Most of the files came from English-speaking countries, through the 1980s and ’90s, as “bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal process, with contradicting laws and overlapping jurisdictions in Rome,” Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger later reported in the New York Times.19 The system yielded grotesque ironies like Castrillón helping the pedophile Trupia find canon law work. In April 2000 bishops from the English-speaking world met with Vatican officials, pleading for help. In 2001 John Paul signed a document that Ratzinger all but drafted, which consolidated the responsibility on the explosive issue in his office.20

None of the cardinals, it is safe to say, envied Ratzinger that task.

Ratzinger was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)—the old Holy Office of the Inquisition. Although it had been renamed in 1965, Sant’Uffizio (Holy Office) was still emblazoned on the majestic rust-colored palazzo just behind the colonnade to the left of St. Peter’s. This is the building where Galileo in 1633 was convicted of heresy for claiming the earth revolved around the sun. Most of the investigations at the CDF had involved theologians accused of straying from orthodoxy. After the 2001 order, the next nine years saw three thousand cases of priests accused of abusing young people lodged in the office.21 The financial reality registered at the Congregation for the Clergy, which is housed in a stately, pale yellow building of four stories some five hundred yards across St. Peter’s Square from the Sant’Uffizio.

In December 2001, when the papal document confirming Ratzinger’s new authority made news,22 the ceiling for a bishop to sell church property was $5 million. A bishop could sell property of lesser value on his own. In June 2002, amid the worst scandal of modern Catholic history, the bishops pulled into Dallas for their summer conference trailed by seven hundred reporters. News coverage swung between survivors staging protests and the bishops’ parliamentary vote for a youth protection charter. In a move that drew far less notice, the bishops voted to raise the ceiling for liquidating assets to $10.3 million in large archdioceses without seeking approval from Rome. In America some two dozen priests had gone back to ministry after jail terms. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops hired R. F. Binder Partners Inc., a Manhattan public relations company that specialized in damage control, to advise them amid the media onslaught after the first four months of 2002.

Back at the Vatican, on that day in 2002 as the cardinals debated other steps to remedy the crisis, Ratzinger suggested a day of prayer for the victims. It was a kind gesture, but the American cardinals faced a bleaker reality. Plaintiff lawyers in the civil suits using discovery subpoenas were gaining ever-deeper access to clergy personnel files, particularly therapists’ reports on the priest offenders, in trying to show how much bishops knew. Getting such documents in an Italian or Spanish court would be most unlikely. The more damaging the evidence, the greater the money (and prestige) lost to the church.

As the cardinals’ meetings ran through a second day, the Americans wanted a show of solidarity with their colleagues from other countries. But as the final session at the