I apologize that this is the same piece to which Matt Boudway drew attention in a thread below. I thought it was a new one. So take out all references to repeating himself.Anthony Grafton has another piece, this time in the NYRB, on Benedict XVI and the sex-abuse scandal. Repeating his claim that Benedict is "the greatest scholar to rule the Church since Innocent III,"I think Benedict XIV ought to be taken into accounthe describes and cricitizes a few of the cases on which Ratzinger/Benedict has had to take a stand. But then come the remarkable final three paragraphs of his essay:

But that is no reason for Catholicsor non-Catholic admirers of the Church, like the present writerto despair. Over the centuries, the central institutions of the Church have often worked in counter-productive ways, emphasizing the powers and prerogatives of the institution over the spiritual life of the faithful. Again and again, Catholics have proved astonishingly resilient and inventive, and have come forward to offer what the hierarchical church was not providing. Under Innocent III, the Curia crystallized as a superbly effective institution, intent on rights and revenues, rather than tending to the poor and sick who were crowding into Europes rapidly growing industrial and trading cities.But when Francis of Assisi founded an order of men who were willing to give up all they had and minister to the urban poor, and Dominic founded a second one of men dedicated to preaching the truth and rooting out heresies, Innocent III immediately gave both of them vital encouragement. Three centuries later, between 1534 and 1549, a very different pope, the politician and aesthete Paul III, offered warm support when Ignatius Loyola arrived in Rome with a few tattered followers and a plan to preach to former Catholics in Protestant lands and to non-Christians overseas, and when St Angela Merici created a new form of religious life for women.It seems unlikely that Benedict is the man to transform the Church, so that it freely and frankly confronts what many priests have done to the children in their charge, and what many of their superiors did to conceal their crimes. Still less does he seem likely to remake the church into an institution that not only worships in an orderly, beautiful and theologically clear way, but also ministers to the world as it is now. But he is a great scholar, with a mind as crisp and deep as Innocents. He knows that the church, whatever its resources, needs its saints, and has often found them far outside the Curia. History matters to the Pope, and that gives some reason to hope that he is not looking for another Dominic, since he himself has played that role so well, and that he too will recognize the Francis or the Angela Merici of our time when he or she appears before him.

This gives an historian's perspective analogous to the distinction that the contemporary journalistNicholas D. Kristoff has given here and here in The New York Times, where he distinguishes the rigid all-male hierarchy and the grass-roots Church doing admirable work in places like Darfur.Both of these approaches confirms me in my insistence that the word "Church" be preserved for the whole complex Catholic thing and not be identified with the hierarchy, whether in praise or in blame.