What Do the Church’s Victims Deserve?
For The New Yorker, Paul Elie writes about the Catholic Church’s efforts to find justice for victims of its sexual abuse crises. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, hired arbitration experts Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros in 2016 to create an Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program (I.R.C.P.), which has distributed $215 million to victims. Elie, a Catholic himself, adds, “Critics of Catholicism from Martin Luther onward have faulted the Church for dealing with matters of sin and repentance through mechanical means: the system of indulgences, the confessional booth. Is the Church today essentially outsourcing a reckoning with its past?”