Some of the pope's adversaries in the church, such as Cardinal Raymond Burke, have another explanation: Gay priests are to blame, they say. Most abuse incidents, Burke told an interviewer last month, consist of "homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men."

"It seems clear in light of these recent terrible scandals," Burke said, "that indeed there is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root."

Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin, writing to Catholics in his diocese last month, noted that the recent incidents of clergy abuse involved "deviant sexual — almost exclusively homosexual — acts by clerics."

"It is time to admit," Morlino wrote, "that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord." . . . "I would say that homosexuality is at the root of this," Morlino answered.