Education Quote by Roger Mahony

“Together” is doing a lot of diplomatic lifting here. Mahony frames institutional crisis as collective learning, a soft-focus narrative that swaps culpability for growth and invites the listener to admire the Church’s capacity for self-correction rather than scrutinize what forced that correction in the first place. The line’s careful vagueness is the point: “has learned a lot” gestures toward reform without naming the harm, the victims, or the failures that made learning necessary. It’s an absolution-by-grammar move, smoothing sharp history into an anodyne process.

The mention of “our own oversight board” is a bid for credibility through structure: we have mechanisms, we have governance, we are being watched. But “our own” also signals control. Oversight, in this phrasing, is not a wrenching concession to external authority; it’s an internal instrument the institution can point to as evidence of responsibility while keeping the boundaries of accountability safely inside the walls.

Then comes the emotional keystone: “wonderful lay leaders” and “a real grace.” Praising lay involvement borrows the legitimacy of non-clerical voices, implying transparency and shared power. Calling it “grace” recodes a hard-won, often demand-driven shift toward lay participation into a spiritual gift, not a remedial measure. Subtext: the Church is not being dragged into change; it is receiving it providentially. The intent is pastoral reassurance and reputational stabilization, a way to narrate crisis management as communal renewal without conceding the full price of the lesson.