Five days later, the New York archdiocese announced that Cardinal McCarrick had been removed from ministry after it received credible allegations that he had molested an altar boy 47 years earlier. Two New Jersey dioceses also publicly acknowledged for the first time that their offices had paid out settlements years before to two seminarians who accused the cardinal of sexual misconduct. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times found that a whistle-blower had tried to warn the Vatican about the cardinal’s behavior before he was made archbishop of Washington, a prominent seat.

Then in August, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released a report finding 300 priests abused more than 1,000 children over 50 years, and alleging cover-ups by some sitting bishops. Attorneys general in at least a dozen states gradually opened investigations, and the federal government has ordered bishops not to destroy documents related to abusive priests.

“The summer of shame has marked a turning point in the way that Catholics, especially American Catholics, are perceiving the church,” Cathleen Kaveny, a Catholic legal and moral scholar at Boston College, said at a symposium in Baltimore on Sunday, a day before the bishops started meeting. “Many people are not seeing the sexual abuse crisis as an aberration within the system, but they’re seeing it as something that really runs throughout the system, that’s enabled by the system.”

The bishops came to their meeting in Baltimore aware that they embody the system, and to demonstrate that they hear the cries of the laity for reform.

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, who was assigned to Boston in 2002 to clean up the scandal there and has become Pope Francis’ American point man on the abuse issue, told the bishops he agreed with them about “how important it is that we come out of this meeting with some very concrete action, so that people will not be convinced that the church is incapable of governing ourselves.”

But they found themselves wedged between their impatient American parishioners and the Vatican bureaucracy. The bishops were startled to learn on Monday morning, as their meeting opened, that the Vatican had ordered them to delay voting on any of the measures they had proposed to make it easier to report, judge and discipline bishops accused of sexually abusing children or adults. Leading bishops speculated that the Vatican did not want the American bishops to get out ahead of a summit meeting in Rome next February for the presidents of all the national bishops conferences to discuss church polices on sexual abuse.

Nevertheless, the American bishops proceeded to discuss the measures, saying they wanted to give their president a clear mandate to take to the Rome meeting. But it soon became clear that they were deeply divided, especially over a proposal to appoint a panel predominantly made up of laypeople to hear accusations of misconduct against bishops.