"When will it end?" By "it" the questioner, a Catholic of more than ordinary sophistication and knowledge, meant the sex abuse crisis.

Reflecting a moment, I answered, "No time soon, I'm afraid. What we're seeing now may be the semi-permanent condition of the Church in America."

When I recounted that exchange to another sagacious observer of Church affairs, he pooh-poohed the view I'd expressed — at least, up to a point. As the crisis becomes more an in-house dogfight among Catholics and less a public spectacle, he maintained, the media will lose interest. And as the media drift away, so will most everybody else. The crisis will go on, but with far less attention than heretofore from the world at large.

I wouldn't bet on it. Hundreds of abuse-related lawsuits already are pending in various parts of the country. More apparently are coming.

In early December the California bishops took the extraordinary step of putting the faithful on notice that a swarm of suits are likely under a one-year suspension of the statute of limitations for child abuse in that state. Many will involve events in the distant past, the bishops said, with the alleged perpetrators and witnesses long since dead. Unfortunately, they remarked, the Church has an undeserved reputation for "deep pockets."

As if that weren't cause enough for concern, the recent events in Boston culminating in the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law supply more. The worry, to put it bluntly, is that the process by which Cardinal Law was toppled will be repeated elsewhere — that something like a purge could lie ahead.

The Boston events could provide a model for an ecclesial cataclysm extending beyond that unhappy See. It is significant that after the cardinal stepped down, voices were raised at once calling for other bishops' scalps. Dissidents and people with grievances may now feel they have the formula for ousting bishops they don't like: To a scandal and/or controversy add piling-on media coverage and skillful exploitation of public indignation. Bring the brew to a boil and — voila — another bishop bites the dust.

It's no whitewash of Cardinal Law's mistakes to say that, in the end, he joined the growing list of victims of the Boston tragedy — a decent, erring man undone by forces he didn't anticipate and was unable to control. Presumably Pope John Paul II finally accepted his resignation, first tendered last April, because he saw it as the only way to restore a measure of peace to a deeply troubled archdiocese.

It would be foolish to suppose that what took place in Boston couldn't happen elsewhere. Already, many of the elements are in place.

These include anger, imprudence, self-righteousness and lack of accurate information on the part of many Catholics, the desire of some journalists — not all, but some — to pursue the embarrassment of the Catholic Church as far as possible, and the cold-blooded calculations of Catholic extremists on the left and right who may see this as the quick and easy route to shaping a Church more to their liking on matters unrelated to the sex-abuse scandal itself.

The recent shocking news from the Gallup organization that the already-low rate of weekly Mass attendance by American Catholics fell even further in the past year — from 39 percent to 28 percent — and that four out of 10 say they are less likely to contribute to the Church quantifies the dimensions of this crisis. When will it all end? Much as I'd like to believe differently, as 2003 gets underway the prediction here is: No time soon.