Time magazine named The Protester its 2011 "Person of the Year" because, for decades till recently, most protests "seemed ineffectual and irrelevant." That's just silly. You can always find resistance and, depending on how you judge, it's often relevant. The spirit of protest is indomitable and inspiring. Eruptions happen constantly, exactly when you don't expect them. That defines resistance: it shouldn't exist but it resists anyway. Often it's crushed but it didn't fail to happen because Time failed to deem it cover-worthy.

It does seem like a miracle, as some British wit once put it, "that an institution run like that has lasted 2,000 years."

Despite everything, the Catholic Church, the world's oldest and largest institution with 2,797 dioceses and more than one billion members worldwide, or one-sixth of the world's population, could be said to be doing well enough. Just not here.

On the other hand, since the Spirit moves in mysterious ways, maybe it's not doing as badly as it seems here either, despite yet more trauma, this time with a particularly raw twist.

As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States.

Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration: