It 's a promise he won 't be able to keep.

It 's not that the pope isn 't sincere. He has spent much of his trip expressing his anguish about the harm predator priests have done to children.

It 's just that pedophiles are too smart to be screened entirely. Pedophiles have fooled Boy Scout leaders, schools, sports teams and churches of all denominations and of all faiths.

Pedophiles will continue to find their way into the priesthood, as they will find ways to prey on children in all vocations.

However, the problem in the Roman Catholic Church was never pedophile priests in the first place. The problem in the Roman Catholic Church was that bishops protected them, moved them from parish to parish and tried, often very successfully, to silence their victims. That went on for decades. Bishops had to choose between protecting children and protecting priests, and they chose to protect priests.

As the pope, himself, acknowledged, the scandal was "sometimes very badly handled by the bishops. " They were also very badly handled by the Vatican.

The emotional center of the pedophile priest scandal was in Boston, where horror story after horror story originated and was hushed up. Cardinal Bernard Law was the archbishop of Boston at the height of the scandal.

And what did the church do to Cardinal Law? It assigned him to a cushy basilica in Rome, where he occupies a place of honor to this day.

Why single out Catholic bishops for such criticism when, as I said, pedophilia infects every profession? Bishops are singled out because of their self-definition as the central authorities of the church.

This is what Madison Bishop Robert Morlino wrote this week in the Catholic Herald:

"The priesthood belongs, in its fullness, to the bishop, unworthy as we are. He is the one in the diocese who is in charge of teaching and sanctifying and governing, and priests are his helpers and co-workers. "

Not only does the bishop have such a central role, he has it because of his unity with the "successor of Peter, " meaning the pope, the bishop continued. Bishops, then, are not mere middle-managers, but are symbolic of the entire faith.

Morlino was writing to urge his parishioners ' backing for a multi-million dollar cathedral for the Madison Catholic Diocese. His definition of the role of bishop, however, explains the loss of respect and awe for the teaching institutions of the church in the wake of the scandals.

The pope, quoting his predecessor, John Paul II, noted "the person principally responsible in the diocese for the pastoral care of the family is the bishop. . . "

The answer to the problem of bad priests, then, is not to recruit better priests, but to recruit better bishops.

But this conclusion, alas, is exactly the conclusion that Pope Benedict failed to draw. Instead, he minimized the past, suggesting that, while things were "sometimes very badly handled, " the current crop of bishops are to be praised because "your efforts to heal and protect are bearing great fruit not only for those directly under your pastoral care, but for all of society. "

Indeed, the pope urged his bishops to see the problem of priest abuse within the "wider context of sexual mores. "

Perhaps so. But the church won 't recover its moral authority until it faces more squarely than it has the question of how its most honored leaders could protect criminals under their authority and, when caught, be rewarded with opulent retirement jobs.

Contact Wineke at bwineke@madison.com or 252-6146. Read Wineke 's blog at www.madison.com/wsj/blogs.