Who is burned now by the fire a bishop summons?

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels of dotCommonweal suggests a bishop other than D’Arcy say amid the Notre Dame/Obama uproar:

Brothers, once when bishops leveled penalties, the effect was to isolate the miscreant from society. Now the effect seems to be to isolate us. Before we take that as a sign of how close to perdition everyone else is, perhaps we should think about our own inadequacies in dealing with the world around us.

Read here entire piece here. Then consider the reflections of victims of clerical sexual abuse on the past silence of "bishops from Phoenix to Rome" on those issues.

Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today writes

"It's galling, really galling, that they are so eager to speak out now on things they have no influence at all, when they kept silent when they could have done some real good," says David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). . . . They are grandstanding to score points with with the Catholic right wing, just as Mahony and O'Malley were grandstanding to the left with their gratuitous denunciation of Bishop Williamson.

Does the contrast between past quiet and current political involvement begin to explain their collective loss of authority?