In 2013, when Pope Benedict XVI resigned, McCarrick was too old to vote in the conclave but was active in the politicking. When Pope Francis was elected, he became an eminence grise, whose lobbying helped elevate several of the new pope’s choices for high office in the American church — including the new cardinal archbishop of Newark, Joseph Tobin, and the head of the Vatican dicastery for family life, Kevin Farrell, both of whom considered McCarrick a mentor.

In other words, two decades after McCarrick should have been removed from his offices, defrocked and handed over to the civil authorities, he was instead wielding remarkable influence in the church … right up until the moment when a lifetime’s worth of crimes were finally dragged into the light.

I think this long and sickening narrative should clarify why the McCarrick case, though “only” about one abuser, merits an expansive and public accounting of the facts. Over the course of multiple decades, across a period in which not just crimes but cover-ups devastated the moral credibility of the church’s hierarchy, many important figures in Rome and the United States must have known that a man who embodied the official response to the scandal was as guilty as any of the priests whose conduct he pretended to deplore.

Someone, or indeed many someones, needs to be held accountable for this disaster. And that accountability requires more than self-exculpating statements from the cardinals involved. It requires judgment — which requires more certain knowledge — which requires investigation — which probably requires an investigator with a mandate from the pope himself.

True, both secular and Catholic journalists can continue digging up incriminating material on who exactly knew what and when, who turned a blind eye and who (perhaps) was blackmailed by their own sins or guilty associations. But many journalists knew the truth about McCarrick years ago, and now as then they can do only so much if the necessary witnesses still feel that the institutional church will not protect them, if they fear their superiors will punish them for telling all the truth.

Moreover, notwithstanding the cardinal’s distinctive prominence and sins, the sex abuse scandal is probably of less interest to investigative reporters than it was in the early 2000s. There are several reasons for this — fatigue from the church’s scandals and so many non-Catholic sex abuse stories since, the fact that Pope Francis is more popular with the press than his predecessors and thus a less inviting target, a discomfort with stories that might involve the outing of prominent clerics, the oxygen-devouring impact of the Trump presidency.

But a crucial reason, and one whose ironies the leaders of the church should meditate upon, is that because of secularization and polarization and the bonfire they have made of their own moral authority, the Catholic bishops are now somewhat protected from media scrutiny by virtue of their increasing unimportance.