Ross Douthat has been at his best with his recent writing about the Catholic Church and Pope Francis. I appreciate especially his stated awareness, in his blog entry this morning, that he hates to be a downer when everybody’s so excited about the new pontiff, but there really is some serious unfinished business to take care of re: the scandal. Excerpt:

And it’s especially important, at the outset of a new pontificate, to understand the precise nature of that shadow, because at this point it’s no longer really about priestly sex abuse itself. Rather, it’s about a church that has cleaned house effectively and set up impressive structures of accountability everywhere except at the most prominent levels of the hierarchy.

Here are two names whose cases richly illustrate that problem. First: Roger Mahony, the retired archbishop of Los Angeles, one of the cardinal electors who just cast their votes in Rome — and among the worst of the worst when it comes to prominent hierarchs who kept predator priests in circulation while protecting them from prosecution. It’s somewhat hard to fathom why Mahony hasn’t faced prosecution, but as of a month ago it looked like he was finally facing some sort of internal church discipline, when his successor as Los Angeles’s archbishop relieved him of his remaining public duties following the release of a new round of incriminating court documents. But since that step was taken, Mahony’s public profile has actually increased: He’s using social media as a pulpit, offering up egregious comparisons between his own supposed persecution and Christ’s suffering, cheerily conducting interviews from Rome, and tweeting obsequiously about how wonderfully the new pope’s focus on simplicity contrasts with the papal norm. (This, from a man who dropped hundreds of millions of dollars on the “Taj Mahony” — Los Angeles’s lavishly hideous new cathedral — while paying out hundreds of millions more of his flock’s dollars settling sex abuse claims.) Accountability, contrition, and silence — those are for the little people. Mahony answers only to Rome, and Rome has not found a way to prevent him from making a spectacle of himself.

More:

If real closure is to come, if the sex abuse era is to be firmly ended rather than ever-so-slowly left behind, the beginning of this papacy is probably the church’s last, best opportunity. And so while I can appreciate the qualities in Pope Francis that so many people have found immediately attractive, I would trade all the humble mannerisms and charming gestures for the promise that the Mahonys and Sodanos of the church would be consigned, once and for all, to lives of penitence and silence.

Amen to that. The problem with John Paul II in this respect wasn’t that he wasn’t charming and charismatic; it’s that he didn’t do anything about the problem, except perpetuate it. Amiability and good PR are not a moral disinfectant.