The outside world regards Pope Francis as a generally good thing. He’s neither infallible nor a saint, but these are points in his favour when one considers some of his predecessors, who have been acclaimed as both. His personal charm, humility and straightforwardness have promised a more human and realistic approach to the personal lives of Catholics, whether gay or straight, married or remarried. When it comes to the planetary crises facing the world, he has been a uniquely powerful advocate for the environment, for migrants, and for the global poor, and one of the few thinkers to understand how closely the great political and environmental crises of our time are linked.

On his visit to Ireland last weekend he called on the church there to pay compensation to the women brutalised in mother-and-child homes. As popes and cardinals have been doing for 20 years now, he expressed sincere horror at the unfolding stories of child abuse. But just as survivors were attacking him for his earlier decision not to set up a tribunal to judge bishops accused of covering up such cases, the right wing of the deeply divided American church struck at him from the other flank. A former Vatican ambassador to the US, Carlo Maria Viganò, demanded the pope’s resignation and accused him of supporting and rehabilitating the now disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Bishop McCarrick, now 88, has been exposed as a serial abuser of trainee priests under his care and Pope Francis has stripped him of his cardinal’s title.

As so often with scandals of this sort, it turns out after the event that “everybody knew” about the bishop for years, but that no one in a position of power ever knew with sufficient moral clarity to be impelled into action. The knowledge remained part of the cloud of poisonous gossip that obscures the workings of the Vatican from outsiders – and even from popes. Pope Francis dislikes gossip and trusts his own instincts. In the case of Bishop McCarrick, this trust was clearly misplaced, as it was in the earlier scandal of the Chilean bishops. But when he was a cardinal, McCarrick was trusted by the entire hierarchy of the US church as well.

For the conservatives, this is evidence of a “lavender mafia” of gay clergy who are corrupting the church. Networks of patronage exist. Francis himself has said so. But to dream of a church purged of its tens of thousands of gay priests and bishops is unrealistic as well as unjust. The underlying problem is one of power and honesty. The Catholic church is at the moment institutionally dishonest about sexuality, and its caste of celibate clergy is by its nature opposed to allowing lay people authority over their own lives, still less over the clergy’s behaviour. Yet this shift in power must come. When allegations of abuse come to light, the bishops must be held accountable by lay Catholics and not just by their peers. This is what powerful lay voices in the US Catholic church now demand. It is all that will restore some credibility to the institution.