"In his first formal meeting Sept. 21 with the now three-year-old Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, the pontiff also called "prophetic" the men and women who urged the church for decades to face the problem."

Prophetic is just the right word.  I heard Fr. Thomas Doyle speak in person for the first time at the height of the sex abuse crisis in 2002.  If ever there was a time I knew I was in the presence of a prophet that was it.  Too bad the bishops ignored him and sent him to the Azores to get him out of the way.  His story reads like that of an Old Testament prophet.  Everything he predicted came true, but people in positions of power, that would be the bishops, didn't want to hear it because preserving the clerical system status quo was more important than the Gospel.