I spoke to him at the archbishop’s residence, a Gothic Revival mansion toward the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In the middle of the last century, when Cardinal Francis Spellman was archbishop—and a confrère of J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, and Pope Pius XII—the residence was known as the Powerhouse. Today, the power of the office is diminished, but the trappings remain: high ceilings, broad staircases, a grandfather clock that rings on the quarter-hour.

Cardinal Dolan, a native Missourian, gave the benediction at President Trump’s Inauguration, and once joined the Rockettes’ kick line at Radio City Music Hall. At sixty-nine, he is a large man, slimmed by black clothes; he wears eyeglasses with severe black frames. We sat in a salon featuring an oil portrait of Cardinal John O’Connor, the late New York archbishop. Dolan told me of arriving in New York a decade ago, and wishing to enact a spirit of reconciliation around priestly sexual abuse akin to the spirit of unity he had seen in the city after 9/11.

“It was a festering wound here,” he said. “That’s not to criticize my predecessor—I think he did a very effective job, but it was still a huge wound on the mystical body of Christ.” He engaged Feinberg and Biros, known for independence, “because, look, as much as it bothers me to admit it, a lot of people, and a lot of victims, don’t trust the archdiocese. They say, ‘Anything that you’re running: forget it!’ ”

I mentioned Cardinal McCarrick as an example of the program’s success. Dolan replied, “I don’t like to brag about it, don’t like to trumpet it, but, since you said it, I would say yes, bingo, you’re right. A victim had the courage and the trust to say, ‘I’m gonna take Dolan at his word, I’m gonna come forward with something that’s been haunting me for, what, a half century almost,’ and they took it very seriously.”

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I pointed to the portrait of Cardinal O’Connor. “The question is: What did he know?” I asked, and cited a report that O’Connor, on his deathbed, had sought to block the appointment of McCarrick to Washington. “Can we expect Barbara Jones to look at that?” I pressed, referring to the retired judge Dolan had retained to conduct an internal review. “Is it part of her purview?”

“I had not heard that,” Dolan said, of the O’Connor report, and explained that, after hiring Jones to review the archdiocese’s policies on sexual abuse, he added McCarrick to her mandate: “I was, like, Oh, brother, now I gotta investigate this. I said, ‘Judge, could you do it?,’ and she said, ‘Sure.’ ”

But didn’t his handling of the Bishop Jenik case, minimizing the accusations in his pastoral letter, undermine the independent compensation program?

“I didn’t undermine it,” Dolan said. “I removed him from the ministry, right? But, just as I have an obligation to the victim, I also have an obligation to listen to the priest—we’re dealing with a very good priest who did this.”

“What did Bishop Jenik do that led to a credible and substantiated allegation against him?”

“I know, but I don’t feel free to talk about the details of it. Let’s just say it rose to the level of a violation of the Dallas Charter.”

“So we can’t talk about what he did? Why not?”

“I’m not sure—we can. What he did was a violation of the Dallas Charter.”

“You removed a bishop for a violation that you can’t discuss?”

“It’s hardly secretive. The victim will tell you.”

I said, “You’ve asked, ‘Why don’t my people believe me?’ Well, I think part of the reason is that you’ve outsourced the telling of the story to the victims and the attorneys. Can you tell me, what did Bishop Jenik do that led to his removal? You can’t say in plain English what he did?”

“No. Well, I could, but I’m not going to.”

When Pope Francis convened the first-ever Meeting for the Protection of Minors, at the end of February, there were panel discussions, Masses, and testimony from survivors of abuse. The papal audience hall rang with the discourse of “best practices”: the mission and the road map, oversight and ownership. For once, Catholic women were allowed to speak: the Nigerian mother superior Veronica Openibo said that “Spotlight” had brought “tears of sorrow” to her eyes; the Mexican Vatican reporter Valentina Alazraki scolded the hierarchs for having called the abuse crisis a “plot” fomented by the press.

The meeting was heavy on rhetoric and light on specifics. It produced no churchwide norms for the prosecution of abusive priests, and gave no indication of how the Church would reckon with abuse and coverup in its past. In a concluding address, Pope Francis said, “In people’s justified anger, the Church sees the reflection of the wrath of God, betrayed and insulted by these deceitful consecrated persons.”

The language was sonorous but vague. More than any other recent Pope, Francis has found ways to address complex situations in clear human terms. Why hadn’t he done so this time? Perhaps he felt that he had adequately addressed the situation simply by calling the meeting. Other clerics suggested as much: Archbishop Mark Coleridge, of Brisbane, likened the Church’s new grasp of sexual abuse to “a Copernican revolution,” and Father Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit who is the Vatican’s sexual-abuse czar, said that the meeting was “a quantitative and qualitative leap” forward. And yet Father Zollner told me last month that he hadn’t spoken with Francis since the meeting about what Francis thought of the proceedings and how they had affected his outlook.

What would count as a revolution, or, at least, a leap forward? It’s hard to say, given the multifaceted nature of the problem. It is a problem of celibacy and sexual ethics. It is a problem involving a subculture of secrecy surrounding gay men in the priesthood. It is a problem stemming from male institutional power over women and children, such as the power that led priests in France to coerce nuns into having sex with them—part of a wider practice that Francis likened to “sexual slavery.” It is a problem of “clericalism,” as Francis has put it, whereby clergy are elevated, protected, and given the benefit of the doubt. Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova, sees it as a problem akin to those of postwar Europe, and proposes that the Church, although it is “not a Nazi or Fascist regime,” must undergo “something similar to a process of ‘de-Nazification’ and ‘de-Fascistization.’ ” Robert Orsi, a historian of Catholicism at Northwestern, sees it as a premodern problem. He told me, “This has been the Catholic normal since the sixteenth century, a culture of sexual permission, in which priests carve out exceptions—with women, with men, with boys—through the idea that sexual experience in those areas is ‘outside the vow.’ As in, ‘I keep the vow when I’m in my clerical blacks, but not outside.’ ”

Beneath all these problems is a problem of truth. With the Second Vatican Council, the Church accepted the vernacular, and with it modern standards of truth in politics, economics, social science, and the like. But, when it comes to sex, the Church still defines truth its own way. A third of a century of abuse and coverup, of crisis and reform, has made that obvious. People are Catholics because they believe there is truth to the story that the Church tells and has told for a very long time. Nothing is more corrosive to this faith than the drawn-out spectacle of a Church that shrinks from the truth about its own past.