Slow to Chide

As the most senior Catholic cleric in England prepares for examination by the secular arm over his church's various little indiscretions with suffering children, it is encouraging to observe a belated note of penitence in the rhetoric. Archbishop Vincent Nichols recently published a letter in which he took personal responsibility for the abuses; although he did commit the gaffe of invoking the family, one of the few social institutions with a worse record of child abuse than the Church. Still, it cannot be denied that there has been some improvement in his Grace's attempts to protect his employers' taxpayer-funded temples of learning: a decade ago his initial response to the revelation of priestly pleasures in Ireland was to extol the courage of the abusers.