Washington Post
By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
As the United States moved toward a possible war with Iraq, the leaders of America's largest religious denomination this week questioned the ethical grounds for a preemptive attack. Yet the statement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was all but drowned out by the church's sex abuse scandal.
It was a matter of deep frustration among the approximately 280 Roman Catholic bishops who gathered in Washington that, at a time when the country might have looked to them for moral guidance, they were struggling to regain their moral credibility instead.
"Everything else we say and do is now seen through the prism of the sex scandal," lamented Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. "But we're going to continue to say and do it, because that's what the church does."
