It seems to be an advantage for one’s career as a bishop to be obtuse in matters of priestly sexual abuse patterns. 

Consider the rector of Mundelein seminary in the 90s, Bishop Gerald Kicanas, who had three reports of “sexual improprieties” by then-seminarian Daniel McCormack, in prison since July for molesting five boys while assigned to St. Agatha parish on Chicago’s West Side.

“There was a sense that his activity was part of the developmental process and that he had learned from the experience,” Kicanas said. “I was more concerned about his drinking. We sent him to counseling for that.”

Counseling for drinking, yes.  None for his homosexuality gone rampant?  Or — dare we say it? — for his homosexuality, period?  These were boys McCormack went after — in a black parish, by the way, where the fatherless boy is common.

Do Kicanas, newly elected as vice president of the bishops’ conference with virtual right of succession to the presidency in three years, and other bishops represent the norm with a willingness to look the other way about sexual “impropriety,” in the vast majority of cases homosexual?

He got elected, didn’t he?