The Catholic bishops in the United States thought they had put this behind them: The Boston Globe publicized the horrifying sexual abuse in the church and the equally horrifying cover-ups in 2002; the movie “Spotlight” based on that story won an Oscar; settlements were paid; and there was a solemn meeting in Dallas during which the bishops adopted new rules — rules from which they exempted themselves — and promised “never again.”

And here we are — again.

The new round of revelations involves pornographic episodes of sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses. (The situation in Philadelphia, the state’s largest diocese, was separately documented in a 2005 grand-jury report.) On top of that, the leading figure from that 2002 convention in Dallas, the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, is accused of sexually assaulting two children in addition to carrying on a series of exploitative sexual relationships with adult seminarians — relationships that had been an open secret among his colleagues. And just last week The Post revealed that the Archdiocese of New York has paid out close to $60 million to sex-abuse victims in the last two years.

The rot is not exclusive to the United States. The Catholic communities in Chile, in Australia, in France and in Ireland have all experienced similar scandals, some of which are ongoing. Scandal has even touched Vatican City itself: At the beginning of the summer, Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella was convicted by a Vatican court of distributing child pornography and sentenced to five years’ incarceration. In 2014, Monsignor Jozef Wesolowski, previously the Holy See’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic, was defrocked for abusing young boys but died before facing criminal proceedings.

There is more talk of reform. What’s needed is something closer to corporate decapitation, the wholesale replacement of an American episcopacy that has shown itself to be beyond institutional redemption.

Perhaps it is time for a smaller but better Catholic Church.

The American Catholic community has been stagnant for a very long time, and it would not be surprising if these scandals — the sheer weight of them going back decades, now — were to hasten the decline in Mass attendance and perhaps hasten an exodus of Americans from the Catholic Church entirely.

If this is likely, it is in part because a considerable share of American Catholics are not Catholic in the sense of believing what the church teaches and receiving the church’s sacraments.

Rather, for many Americans, particularly in the baby-boomer generation and those near to them, Catholicism is not a religious faith but a cultural identity. There are many Catholics who are Catholic in the sense that restaurateurs in South Philly are Italian and ward-heelers in Boston are Irish — it is an identity marker that is less about who they are and more about who their grandparents were. If Catholicism is only a social club, then membership is at this moment not highly desirable.

Still, Americans compose only 5 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics. Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines are the heaviest hitters, and the growth market is Africa, where the church faces a different kind of sexual scandal.

The baptized Catholic population of Africa has grown by a fifth in the past four years, from 186 million to 222 million. The general impression of the African church is that it is more conservative than the American or European communities — except on the matter of celibacy. Monsignor Giacomo Canobbio, a theologian and proponent of allowing more married priests, says bluntly: “In Africa a good percentage of priests de facto have a family.” Compared to McCarrick et al., a Catholic priest married to a woman hardly seems scandalous at all. And it isn’t, necessarily: The church already permits married priests in narrow circumstances.

Liberal critics of the church have long linked the practice of celibacy to clerical degeneracy, though that leaves unexplained and identical pathological degeneracy in Protestant communities, in Jewish congregations, in public schools, in the Secret Service, etc.

A more likely explanation is the one poet Ezra Pound hit upon 80 years ago: The trouble in the Catholic Church — its cultural and doctrinal crises — was rooted, he thought, in the fact that the Catholic hierarchy had ceased believing its own dogma.

Things have not improved in the subsequent eight decades. If the US bishops had truly taken to heart their own teachings, then they would not have proceeded as though their hats liberated them from the human condition and exempted themselves from the same oversight they imposed on their subordinates. A church with a laity alive to the full implications of the Catholic notion of communion would not have accepted it.

What do American Catholics believe? For the laity, the answers may be found in the polling data. For the bishops, the answer is, apparently, that they believe most intensely in their own sublimity, unholy though it may be.

That’s an old story for Christians. The oldest, in fact. There’s no putting that behind us, either.