Journalists hoped to get answers during the summit, to their own questions and to those asked by victims and others. But, during their regular press conferences, the summit's organizers seemed to tell journalists often that they were not asking the right questions.
Questions about the role homosexuality plays in abuse, for example, were shot down quickly by Scicluna as an unhelpful and irrelevant categorization, when, he said, focus should instead be on "single cases."
But Gisotti told media in the run-up to the summit that bishops would not be fielding any questions about individual priests' and bishops' cases during the four-day conference.
Journalists were left wondering which was true.
Much of the talk, ultimately, focused on general principles of child protection and the abuse of minors, not on bishops' accountability -- with final suggestions ranging from handbooks and new guidelines to amending the use of the pontifical secret and creating a new department in the Roman Curia.
Questions from victims
Meanwhile, outside of the synod hall, dozens of victims, many of whom had travelled from outside Italy to be there, were insistent that they wanted to see the Vatican take an immediate zero-tolerance approach to abusive clergy and bishops who have covered up, and to release information on abuse cases processed by the CDF.
Though they began the week with the cautious hope of answers, victims' groups left Rome with more demands than they started with.
When bishops' accountability did feature in discussion, it came wrapped in the language of "synodality" and "collegiality," while observers complained that those terms were nebulous, and their intended meaning hard to understand.
What few discernable policy proposals there were seemed, to many, little more than articulations of the principle that bishops should be responsible for holding each other accountable -- something widely noted to have been lacking in the case of the former cardinal and archbishop Theodore McCarrick.
Cardinal Blase Cupich, for example, re-debuted his so-called "metropolitan model" for bishop accountability, which he first proposed to US bishops in November. Cupich offered the proposal as a way of providing mutual accountability among bishops and advancing the cause of "synodality."
Yet, he found himself facing immediate -- and clearly unwelcome -- questions about how his approach would have worked in the case of Theodore McCarrick, who was himself the metropolitan bishop for much of his ministry and supported by suffragan bishops who were at times themselves not above suspicion.
When pressed for details on how cases involving negligent bishops would be handled, Cardinals Sean O'Malley and Cupich pointed to Come una madre amorevole -- Pope Francis' 2016 motu proprio setting out legal mechanisms for reporting and handling complaints against bishops -- as existing policy for bishops' accountability that is only lacking application.
This, despite the pope himself walking back the proposal in August when he said the "so-called tribunal of inquiry on bishops" outlined in Come una madre amorevole had been abandoned because it "wasn't practical and it also wasn't convenient for the different cultures of the bishops that had to be judged."
The results
The Vatican sex abuse summit promised to give victims, Catholics, and journalists answers to their questions about the crisis of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up in the Church.
Instead, during the summit, organizers told them they could not even ask their questions.
Back in October, Scicluna told those losing trust in the Church's handling of abuse cases to be patient. At the end of the abuse summit, with more questions emerging than answers supplied, at least some journalists, victims, and Catholic are asking: "why is this all taking so long?"
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.