J. Michael Hennigan, attorney for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, said he is "generally a big fan of Steve Cooley," but that the district attorney's remarks were "irresponsible."

"It is irresponsible for a law enforcement official to suggest that a crime has been committed when he has no evidence of it," Hennigan said.

The settlement with 508 victims, formalized Monday, calls for a private judge to review and release church documents obtained during the negotiations, although attorneys and advocates for the victims noted that details of the handoff have yet to be worked out. They said they doubted the full truth would ever emerge.

My wife and I wondered what to do: Should we stay away in anger at our leaders, as some of our churchgoing friends in the Pasadena area were doing? And what, if anything, should we put in the collection basket — a comically symbolic question when viewed against a $660-million payout....

When the collection basket came around, my wife set her jaw and passed it on. Maybe if that happens 660 million times, someone will notice.

Let me put my cards on the table: I'm an unabashed admirer of Sorkin's work. He is a rare breed of writer today who uses both humor and a bracing moral seriousness to wrestle with the complexity of the real world. But "Studio 60," as good as some individual episodes were, never seemed to find a consistent voice, a must for must-see TV. It was, in hindsight, a bad idea, if for no other reason than it tried to graft Sorkin's fascination with social issues onto a story about career crises in the rarified [sic] world of TV comedy writers. But that made the show only more irresistible — we got to see a brilliant writer try to breathe life into a doomed premise.