John L. Allen Jr.

CNN Sr. Vatican Analyst

Vatican Correspondent, National Catholic Reporter

Three days ago, I got an e-mail from a fellow journalist telling me that Bernie McDaid, a victim of priestly sex abuse whom I had met in 2003 in Rome, wanted to reach me. At the time, I was overwhelmed with coverage of the first day of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to America, and inclined to file the e-mail under “things that can wait.”

My colleague’s teaser that “you’ll want to hear this,” however, stirred me to make the call right away.

I sensed something might be up, because two weeks earlier I had interviewed the Vatican’s ambassador in the United States, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, who told me that a meeting between the pope and sex abuse victims while Benedict was in America remained “within the field of possibility.” I also understood that such a meeting would be historic, since no pope had ever before sat down with victims to hear their stories, offer his apology, and solicit their advice as to how the church might respond.

As it turns out...

McDaid was among a handful of victims invited to meet with Benedict XVI in a strictly private encounter at the Vatican embassy in Washington on Thursday afternoon. McDaid shared that information with me on the basis of strict confidentiality until it actually happened, saying the victims had been warned that any advance disclosure could result in the meeting being cancelled.

For any journalist, sitting on a story of the magnitude of the pope’s meeting with victims was obviously frustrating. Nevertheless, those were the conditions McDaid and the other victims imposed. We understood that premature disclosure could also wreck the opportunity for the event to occur at all.

McDaid had reached out to me because of his experience in Rome five years ago. Along with two other victims from the Boston area, McDaid had come to Rome without any appointments or introductions from anyone, looking to get someone in the Vatican to listen. Though he didn’t succeed in seeing the pope on that occasion, he did meet with a senior aide, and the event put McDaid on the Vatican radar screen.

As the Vatican correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter, I profiled McDaid at the time, impressed by his dogged efforts to knock on Vatican doors until someone took him seriously.

Wednesday and Thursday, both CNN and my newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, mobilized to be ready to move when the time came. In the end, the news broke on CNN’s Situation Room and on-line on NCR’s web site just instants after the Vatican issued a statement confirming that the meeting took place.

In a TV exclusive just hours later, McDaid and two of the other victims, Olan Horne and Faith Johnston, told their stories to CNN’s Campbell Brown and Anderson Cooper. Listening to all three describe the abuse they suffered, and what meeting the pope meant to them, made for some powerful television.

As things move forward, there will be legitimate questions about whether Pope Benedict’s strong language and gestures about the sex abuse crisis will result in new policies or structural changes in the church. But for those who thought it was time to just stop talking about it, Pope Benedict’s record this week certainly points to a very different approach.

Even if we had to wait a couple of days, that’s a story worth telling.