Insensitivity on high

The measure of the Rev. John Hanrahan's insensitivity is hard to take. He was asked, in a deposition, whether he thought parishoners didn't need to know their   was an admitted pedophile. He answered, ''I think they can adequately protect (their children) without knowing it.''

That kind of lofty detachment, in such matters, is breathtaking.

One fears that Rev. Hanrahan's willingness to betray this view has a broader, darker meaning. Did he do it unabashedly because he saw and heard that attitude accepted, routinely, in Louisville's archdiocesan offices, where he worked as chancellor and kept church records?

It's a small, even a perversely logical, step from such an attitude to his decision against investigating one parent's report of a priest's alleged sexual abuse, and against reporting another priest who admitted having molested boys.

Rev. Hanrahan told one complainant that he, the parent, should speak to a priest who might have molested his son. This goes to the heart of the argument made by 185 plaintiffs against the archdiocese: that it failed to take responsibility for its clergymen's actions; that it separated itself from the problem and failed to address it.

No obligation to notify parishoners? No obligation to intervene on their behalf?

Rev. Hanrahan remembers four priests having been accused of misconduct during the time he spent at the chancery. But attorney William McMurry represents 150 or more clients who have alleged that wrongdoing took place during those years. The (to put it politely) discontinuity in these numbers has several possible explanations, only some of them sinister.>