I recently read Daniel Quinn’s novel After Dachau. It is a cleverly done piece of alternate history: its premise (warning – spoiler!) is that the Nazis won the war, but the reader does not realize this until he is well into the novel.
I won’t go into all the details, but we learn that time dated A.D., After Dachau, where the great hero Adolf Hitler defeated the Jews.
Someone discovers what really happened, and tries to alert people. But what he learns for his pains is that NO ONE CARES.
I often feel that way about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. A handful of people do care, but the Vatican realizes that even in the developed world, very few care, and the typical Catholic is a South American or African peasant who has not even heard of the sexual abuse crisis, and in any case is facing problems even more urgent, such as starvation, massacres, and persecution.
Pope Francis may say the right things – after all, who will defend child molestation? – but will he do the right thing? His record in Argentina does not look promising.