To get some perspective on the rank-and-file Catholic mentality, look at this incident from yesterday.

The guy's own superiors have said that this 32-year-old priest, a hero of the local Hispanic community, has admitted to repeatedly sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Yet 50 supporters await him outside jail, some putting up their homes as security to pay his bail.

If this relative kid can command such unquestioning (and just plain dumb) loyalty, do you really think that people whose grasp catechetical nuances extends to having been raised to believe by parents who believed, as they now do, that the Pope is infallible are going to understand between ordinary pronouncements, opinions, and "ex cathedra" statements of doctrine?

The fact is that most Catholics believe that if the Pope says the sky is yellow, it must be yellow. "Don't contradict Father or Sister" is part or the Catholic culture, across the board; more-so in certain ethnic communities.

I encountered it in spades when trying to get justice for the victims of Msgr. Vincent I. Breen. Nearly two decades after "retiring" as a condition of not going to jail, in the face of his own diocese admitting that he was a serial predator who abused dozens of girls over 30 years, some of his "loyal" parishioners still insisted that he was a "good man" who'd been unjustly persecuted.

Their logic consisted of his coming to their house for steak and whiskey once a month and saying nice things while accepting big checks and putting them on the Parish Council so they could feel important.

How do you think the Churches (Roman Catholic and Mormon, strange bedfellows) managed to get Proposition 8 passed in California? They traded on they "loyalty" of their flock who'd been indoctrinated never to think for themselves. And it worked.

Folks like our Joe Offer, who can see through the smokescreen, are the exception, not the rule. And well they know it.