So much has already been written about Pope Benedict’s remarkable meeting with sex abuse victims — but this piece by John Allen tells the story behind the story.

It’s just one more reason why Allen remains one of — if not the — best Vatican reporter on the planet. Take a look:

Almost from the beginning of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church, there have been demands that the pope take a more personal role, including meeting with victims. For many, the fact that neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI had ever met with victims was seen as a symbol that the Vatican was out of touch, or in denial, about the gravity of the problem.

In March 2003, three victims from Boston came to Rome in an attempt to meet with the pope. One was Bernie McDaid, who was among the five to meet Pope Benedict XVI on April 17. Though the three victims did not meet John Paul on that occasion, they did meet with Msgr. James Green, then head of the English desk in the Secretariat of State. (Green is today the papal nuncio in South Africa.)

Green brought a message from John Paul II: “The Holy Father realizes the seriousness of this problem, and is doing all he can,” the victims said Green told them, adding that they were free to share the message with other survivors. “He will continue to do all he can to heal the church and to pray for the victims. He will see that this doesn’t happen again.”

While the victims involved said that message was of some consolation, desire for a direct meeting with the pope never went away.

Those hopes were revived one year ago, when the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, invited Pope Benedict XVI to address the General Assembly in 2008. As it became clear that the pope intended to visit the United States this spring, (Cardinal) O’Malley wrote the pope to urge him to put Boston on his itinerary, in part so that he could meet with victims and promote healing from the sexual abuse crisis.

O’Malley learned in November, during the U.S. bishops’ fall meeting in Baltimore, that the pope’s itinerary in the States would include only Washington and New York. He wrote again, this time along with the bishops of the province, asking the pope to reconsider. Once again the answer came back no, on the grounds that given the pope’s age, a third stop in America was impractical.

At that stage, O’Malley penned a personal appeal to the pope, asking him to meet with victims at another point along his itinerary. In late February, Benedict wrote a personal letter to O’Malley saying that he wanted to meet with victims in Washington, and asking him to put together a group of five people. The pope’s letter indicated that the meeting was to be pastoral, private and personal.

From that point, O’Malley asked Fr. John Connolly and Barbara Thorp of the Boston archdiocese, both of whom have long experience in working with survivors, to help him organize the meeting. Roughly three weeks ago, the victims were called, one by one, and asked to meet on the last Wednesday and Thursday in March to discuss the idea of seeing the pope. Each agreed to participate in the meeting. Shortly before departure for Washington, all five met in the rectory of Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston for pizza with O’Malley, Connolly and Thorp. In part, this was a “getting to know you” session, since only two of the victims, McDaid and Olan Horne, knew one another prior to this experience. The group was also briefed on what to expect in terms of Vatican protocol.

In part because the Vatican insisted on confidentiality before the fact, O’Malley and his aides opted to reach out to survivors whom they knew, and who they felt would honor the need for discretion. At the same time, they also thought it was important to avoid impressions of “hand-picking” survivors who would be non-confrontational. Partly for that reason, two of the five survivors who took part, McDaid and Horne, have a track record of being publicly critical of the church’s response to the crisis.

Three days before the meeting, McDaid contacted me to alert me of what was in the works. (I had profiled McDaid back in 2003 during his trip to Rome.) I made both the National Catholic Reporter and CNN aware of the plans, so that we could prepare our coverage. At least two other media organizations also had advance knowledge of the meeting, National Public Radio and The Boston Globe. All agreed to wait until the meeting had taken place to make it public.

The Vatican spokesperson, Fr. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement immediately after the meeting broke up on April 17, which was delivered via e-mail to members of the Vatican press corps. In a sign of sensitivity to the survivors, Lombardi agreed to delete a reference to the exact number who met with the pope from the statement; in the end, however, the number (five) became public record when the survivors themselves confirmed it.

Due to my relationship with McDaid, the three survivors who decided to speak publicly about their encounter with the pope did so for the first time on television on CNN, just three hours after the meeting ended. Video of that interview with McDaid, Horne, and Faith Johnston can be found here: ‘Unfiltered access’ to pope.

I was in contact with McDaid and Horne leading up to the meeting, so I know something of the pressures the survivors faced. For one thing, the two who did not wish to go public were aware that publicity surrounding the meeting might result in disclosure of their identities and their personal stories. (To date, that hasn’t happened). All five knew that other survivors, including organized survivor groups, would likely be critical, suggesting that the meeting was a publicity stunt and that the five victims were playing into the church’s hand. To some extent the victims were also rattled by the church’s insistence upon confidentiality, since demands for secrecy were a central element of the pattern of abuse they had suffered in the first place. The survivors also knew there would be massive press interest; the night the three appeared on CNN, for example, producers from other television programs camped outside the network’s Washington bureau hoping to pounce on them when they exited.

Despite those strains, by most accounts all five held up remarkably well. As Johnston put it, “We are no longer just ‘victims’ — the Holy Father now sees us as individuals who have survived terrible physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse.”

Read the whole thing. It’s just fascinating. And unexpectedly moving.