The Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland met its self-imposed deadline Tuesday with a report to the Cumberland County District Attorney on the sexual abuse of minors. As promised, the report describes allegations by victims against priests and other diocese employees still living. Also as promised, diocese officials soon will provide prosecutors with information about priests and employees who have died since the alleged abuse took place and about secondhand allegations.

Not as promised, the diocese has decided against providing the public with a breakdown on the number of allegations and how they were handled. This change of plans is done on the advice of Cumberland DA Stephanie Anderson and the Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe.

Prosecutors will always advise in favor of confidentiality; their interest is investigating crime and prosecuting offenders, and the less information rattling around in public the better. The diocese’s interest here is far more complex: There is a gaping wound in the church to heal; public confidence in church leadership to restore; and the reputations of the vast majority of honest and ethical priests and employees to preserve. Acknowledging the number of allegations and describing, with full protection of anonymity, how alleged perpetrators and victims were treated – from job reassignments to out-of-court settlements – can hardly jeopardize a criminal investigation.

This outline of the scope of this tragedy must not be confused with demands by victim advocates that the diocese release the names of all priests against whom allegations have been made. In other cases of alleged criminal activity, the names of persons under investigation rarely are made public until arrest or indictment. In this case, the church’s years, even decades, of dealing with these offenses in-house has given some of these alleged offenders protection from arrest or indictment under the statute of limitations. Still, the same high standards of the grand jury should prevail; no public accusation without evidence, testimony under oath sand a determination of probable cause. If the church’s past actions on this matter – the entire church, not just the Portland diocese – have had the taint of cover-up, the answer is not to respond with a witch hunt.

The Portland diocese hardly is the center of this scandal. Far larger dioceses – Boston, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Baltimore – have hit much harder. In every such diocese, the damage to both victims and the church was aggravated by the painfully slow process by which leadership came to the realization that not everything that goes on within the church is strictly the church’s concern. The Portland diocese is waking to that reality and should be commended for rendering unto the criminal justice system the things that are criminal. There still is a debt owed to the public.