Any more of this silence-is-golden stuff, and I will vomit.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) will not vote this week on two highly-anticipated proposals to respond to the sex-abuse crisis, after a last-minute Vatican intervention.

As the American bishops gathered for their November meeting in Baltimore, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the USCCB president, announced a stunning change in the agenda for the three-day meeting. Because of a directive from Rome, he said, the bishops would not vote on one proposal to institute a code of conduct for bishops, and another to organize an independent investigation, under lay leadership, into the bishops’ response to the abuse scandal. Those two proposals were easily the most visible items on the USCCB agenda, and had drawn enormous media coverage for the bishops’ meeting.

So it goes. The Kremlin speaks, that decides the matter. Or as the Latin says so well, Causa finita est.

Anybody out there still wondering about Pope Francis’ position on clerical abuse? Speak now or shut up for a while.

It’s a long-distance slapping down of the Americans. Let’s see how disappointed reporters and editors react.

Bishops as altar boys. Collegiality, anyone?

Finally, if this ain’t clerical privilege, what is?

Including this if not breathless then blithely half-informed, supposedly neutral observers’ account of Francis and his menu for protecting victims of clerical sexual abuse:

[David] Gibson [go-to comment source for this piece] agrees with Francis the only way to eliminate sex abuse is to wipe out the sense of entitlement and unaccountability enshrined in that culture so dear to Roman Catholic conservatives — clericalism.

“He needs to change this culture of the ‘old boys’ network’ of secrecy, and of self-protection,” Gibson says. “That’s really the ultimate answer here”

But, Gibson adds, that sort of change will likely be a long time coming.

Especially under Francis, who uses the old boys by preference, creating a regular boys’ town of supporters and apparatchiks.