Patricia Lockwood is quite brilliant (she didn't even go to college because she had a strange dad who killed her chances by not saving money for his kids' college education). that's her below, writing about the sexual misconduct cover-ups in churches.

"All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine - it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It's about not being able to choose the secrets you've been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

In the not-so-far future, Bishop Finn will be forced to resign by Pope Francis, who is proving to be a figure worthy of some study. My father will publish a letter of staunch support in the church bulletin, suggesting that the bishop was being persecuted for his conservative beliefs, that in fact he had committed no crime at all, and that the prosecutor in his case was a mercenary with "strong ties to the abortion industry." I will be so disheartened by this that I can barely speak to him or meet his eyes for weeks. Though later he will tell my mother, with perhaps the first stirrings of doubt, "I'm beginning to think any one of them would have done it. That the position is more powerful than the man."