I remember being asked by Larry King to comment on the pedophile crisis a few years ago. The public was outraged at the leniency of the Church toward child abuse in the priesthood, their policy being to quietly whisk the offenders off for rehabilitation through prayer and counseling. The secular position was that these priests were criminals who should be punished with long prison sentences. I told Larry King it seemed to me that here was a perfect example of being caught between two world views. On one side pedophilia was framed as temptation and sin, the remedy being to ask God's forgiveness and pray for divine healing. On the other side, pedophilia was a legal offense, and expectations for any kind of rehabilitation were low, given that pedophiles obsessively repeat their actions over and over, sometimes hundreds of times. The psychopathy was well documented, and priests were no exception.

Larry looked shocked at my answer and said, "But you do agree that they should be punished to the full extent of the law?" He didn't want me to dig myself into a hole with his audience. But even as I agreed that, of course, pedophile priests should be punished, I wondered about these two worlds, which all of us must balance if we are on the spiritual path. If it prevailed totally, secular society would punish every misdeed without mercy and with no recourse to atonement and salvation. The soul would play no part. At the opposite extreme, sectarianism would let sinners continue to do wrong as long as they had confessed to God and done their best to change, even when their best was pitiably inadequate. Sin would be used to rationalize crime.

We know how this current crisis is going to keep unfolding. Lawyers and prosecutors will hound the Church, more lawsuits will be filed and won, more victims will come forward, and the Church will try to hold on to as much of its money and property as possible. As for the general decline in church attendance, there's no reason to feel that this trend, now decades old, will be reversed. Yet the Pope clings to the notion that lack of faith is the core problem and regaining faith the ultimate solution. How can he think otherwise when that is the very foundation of the Kingdom of God? The tragedy is that the mystery of the two worlds affects us all, and the Church has become too tainted by scandal to offer answers that might satisfy a new generation of seekers.