Differential treatment: two cases; "women priests are excommunicated, pedophile priests are coddled."

Hans Kung has written eloquently on the nature of the church, and the need to recognize that "those who hold office do not stand over the people of God but are within it; they are not rulers but servants."

Nowhere is that need more evident than in the current sexual abuse scandal. The hierarchy's inability to understand the depth of the problem and their own culpability in it is mind-boggling. At issue are not only their actions, but the values underlying them.

To understand those values, it's helpful to compare their responses to two very different groups of ordinands: women acting on their calling to be priests, and men acting on their compulsion to be pedophiles. The seven women, ordained in June 2002 by a dissident archbishop in Europe, were quickly excommunicated, and their appeal was denied a few months later. The men, hundreds of them, were coddled for decades, allowed to be not merely communicants but priests in good standing, and only removed from their so-called ministries when their crimes could no longer be covered up.

Cardinal Ratzinger said the women's action "wounded" the church. Now if a few women breaking outdated rules to become priests is a wound, you might think so many priests molesting children, destroying their lives and abrading their souls, is a nuclear meltdown. But not, apparently, to the hierarchy. To them, it has mainly seemed to be a huge embarrassment.

And what of their own conduct toward these priests? "Mistakes were made," Boston's Cardinal Law said. As though the desecration of lives were morally equivalent to saying 2 + 2 = 5. To everyone else, it's clear that the wounding of the church was done by the predator priests and those in the hierarchy who abetted their crimes. The women's only crime was defiance of authority, putting their own judgment above that of the hierarchy. They decided they were tired of waiting, all these decades after Vatican II, and taking matters into their own hands. But that, to the hierarchy, seems to be the ultimate sin.

The princes of the church seem immersed in a closed system with a disturbingly skewed morality. The world, in the form of relentless-publicity and major lawsuits, has intruded and shaken their stronghold. But instead of prompting a re-evaluation of their own behavior and attitudes, it has only made them cling more tightly to the old order.

The church, clerical spokesmen keep saying, isn't a democracy. It's about authority. Thus women can't be ordained because the pope says so. Systems are now in place to prevent further abuse, so let's move on. The fathers, still and always, know best. But it is precisely unquestioning obedience to authority that allowed the damaged and damaging priests to go unchecked for so many years.

That thinking has changed. During the run-up to Cardinal Bernard Law's resignation in Boston, a woman I know simply informed the pastor of her church that she would be circulating a petition on the sidewalk.

The pastor preferred that she not do it. She did it anyway. When I commended her for telling their pastor what they were going to do, instead of asking his permission, she replied, "It is hard to break the old, ingrained, 'Yes, Father' habit, but the ultimate feeling of acting on your own conscience is worth the effort."

And so, in small ways and large, the people are taking back the church, forced by the outrages against children to question the premises of a system that not only allowed them to happen, but facilitated them.

Mary Rice writes from Cambridge, Mass.

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