What a surprise it was for me to read in the New York Times in late June of this year that allegations of child abuse had been leveled against McCarrick. Most of us thought that he was interested only in young men, and that he might have been satisfied only with physical proximity. With the new allegations we were entering another realm entirely. This is when I contacted reporters at the Times and told them about my efforts to report McCarrick’s behavior with seminarians. Now so much that had been covered up for so many years at last came out—though quite likely not everything. And of course the revelations about McCarrick were soon followed by the report of the Pennsylvania district attorney. The second phase of the American church’s sexual-abuse crisis had begun.

The anger that has arisen among Catholics in response to the cascade of information about McCarrick has been aimed at two things. First, there are the acts that McCarrick was accused of having committed. Second, there is the fact that many of McCarrick’s peers in the hierarchy seem to have been aware of at least some of those acts—specifically, those having to do with seminarians—and said nothing. McCarrick’s brazenness and lack of shame, his indifference to what others who knew of his behavior might have thought of him (and he ought to have known that they knew), are shocking enough. The fact that those who knew about at least some of his misconduct did not shun him—that he was accepted and even fêted by his peers—is every bit as shocking.

There is talk now of a mechanism to address malfeasance in the hierarchy. Would I be naïve if I said that such a mechanism already exists and that its classic name is fraternal correction? There is a warrant for it in the Gospel: “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault” (Matthew 18:15). At the very least, the bishops who knew about McCarrick should have asked him if what was being said about him was true. Who knows how he would have answered, but at least his brother bishops would have opened the door to fraternal correction. Of course, the worst deeds McCarrick is accused of were already behind him by the time he became a bishop, and there is no reason to suppose that other bishops knew about those. But if they had questioned him about his misconduct with seminarians, they would not have been dragged down with him when that misconduct later became public. As it is, his sins have tarnished them, and they are all too well aware of it. The case of Theodore McCarrick is, among other things, a case of the failure of fraternal correction.

One way to make up for this failure would be for the ecclesiastical authorities, including Pope Francis, to act in a manner that is not only fair and swift (justice delayed is justice denied), but that also makes sense to the general public. An example of what doesn’t make sense to most people was the 2004 appointment of Cardinal Law as archpriest of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome after his missteps as archbishop of Boston brought the abuse crisis to a head in 2002. The Vatican may have viewed this as a demotion, but to the majority of the laity it seemed like a rather cushy assignment. McCarrick has recently been relegated to a religious house in Victoria, Kansas, where he is to live “a life of prayer and penance,” but such a discipline may sound medieval and all too remote from the common experience of most Catholics today. If he is guilty of what he has been accused of, and if prison is not an option because of the statute of limitations, McCarrick’s public removal from the priesthood, not just the College of Cardinals, would be an appropriate and generally understandable response to his crimes and sins. The laicization of the cleric who was perhaps the most public face of the institutional church in the United States would also demonstrate that the victims of abuse, both children and adults, count for more in the church than the institution. After all, that institution exists for the sanctification of the individual members of the Body of Christ; the members do not exist for the institution. Father, then bishop, then archbishop, then cardinal: Theodore McCarrick had those titles and the corresponding responsibilities for our sake; his betrayal of them for his own purposes has made them meaningless.

Correction: This article originally stated that Theodore McCarrick "has recently been relegated to a religious house in Salina, Kansas..." In fact, the house is in Victoria, Kansas, which is in the Diocese of Salina.