What a stupid post, akenaton.

The Catholic Church has been a big part of my life and it still is for many members of my close and extended family, including my parents, who are still battling on. I can write articulately and grammatically and I have priests and brothers to thank for that. I'm a scientist and I received a pretty good grounding in the basics of science at my secondary school. Whatever moral standpoints I now adhere to must have had their germ in my Catholic upbringing. It's the only one I had, after all.

Looking back, I also see that I was exposed to the kinds of absurdities that I occasionally like to make fun of here. We Catholics were the only people who could get to heaven and masturbation meant hellfire. Stuff like that. No-one's ever managed to tell me what happened to all those poor buggers who ate meat on Fridays before the rule was relaxed. And no one-legged man has ever come home from Lourdes with two legs.

But I found it easy enough to escape. I'm an atheist of the Dawkins persuasion, but I must confess that leaving Catholicism behind isn't going to get you beheaded even if your granny might go ballistic. I think that adherence to a religion and a belief in an impossible deity is infantile in the extreme. But anyone who wants to believe it is fully entitled to do so, no ifs, no buts.

Catholicism is like all other religions in that it can only survive by catching people before they are sentient beings. I don't like that dishonesty one little bit and I think it damages people. But the current problem for the Church is that it is failing to demonstrate that it holds the moral high ground. Simply moving errant priests to remote parishes won't do. You'll be found out. Denying the dreadful abuses of the past by trying to rationalise them is disreputable. Wrongdoing is wrongdoing. Either you confront that in a straightforward, open and honest way or you risk being branded institutionally hypocritical.