Many, many Catholic faithful are not complicit in the least with the moral depravity among the priests. They remain faithful and are further growing in their faith, but are sadly struggling to hear the shepherd’s voice. The baneful influence of the Modernist heresy seeks to rot the faith from the inside out until the whole structure of the institutional Church can appear to outsiders to be at risk of collapse. The moral misbehavior of bishops and cardinals is a symptom of this modernist-fomented rot and should therefore never be considered in isolation from other such symptoms if one seeks to understand the true plight of the church. The Catholic laity still desperately need true spiritual leadership but the same is becoming harder and harder to find in any given diocese. The public weaknesses of many of our prelates really do tend to scandalize the faithful and cause many to turn away from the faith. It’s a shame but it takes time to recover with backsliding always being a possibility (or a present reality).