Thank you for navigating this faultline with such care and diligence. I still struggle and have for a long time with all this.

Pius XII’s accommodation of the Reich, the systematic cover-up of clerical abuse, were institutional decisions, made by church authorities acting in their official capacity, often to protect the institution itself.

The theological framework itself seems to inadvertently provide some institutional cover as I read it. If the Church is holy by nature, and sin belongs only to individual members, then the institution as Institution is immunized from accountability. The apologies become personal and spiritual rather than structural and legal.

This essay (to me) reflects your awareness of this - but yet doesn’t take this fully into account. Maybe it just can’t take that leap - it seems organizations in general mightily struggle on the point of deep reflecower/ culpability /action, and “politics” holds its own tacit power.

Thank you for the opportunity to think this through.