Douglas Kmiec:

Well, he obviously is a person who has a great deal of good will. He has shown himself to be a person who's not judgmental, who is open-minded, and who is willing to go down new directions.

And Professor Cummings has put her finger on it. It's not just addressing this specific problem of a specific person who's been hurt. Obviously, that person needs great care and great compensation and great kindness on the part of the church, not being rebuffed or hidden away or told that maybe he misunderstood something.

So, on the parish level, we have to make sure that the victim, the person who's been abused, has been helped.

At the episcopal level, they have to be constantly of the mind that the investigations that Professor Cummings talked about are being responded to.

And then, at the larger level, at the Vatican level, here's where Pope Francis is the kind of person who's creatively thinking about the future of the church. To what degree is this problem related to gender? To what degree is this problem related to the fact that there is no real married priesthood in the context of the church?

Now, these are bigger questions and profound doctrinal questions. But they interrelate with this one, because 90 percent of the cases that are here are cases that are aimed at males, especially male adolescents, middle years and later.

And, obviously, if you have a seminary that's built all around a male culture, which has all of the associated gender problems with that, you're not actually getting at the root of the difficulty.

I think Pope Francis is the person who's the right pope at the right time to address those issues.