Jim, time and time again you have accused me of denying or defending wrongdoing done in the Catholic Church, and that is untrue and unfair. I acknowledge that wrongdoing has been a widespread scandal in the Catholic Church, but I have also seen many church leaders who have done remarkably good things.

I see the "thanks be to God" story that you told, and I conclude that the priest is a bastard. You see the same story, and you conclude that all priests are bastards - and you have the gall to accuse me of denying the wrongdoing because I do not agree with your broad conclusion.

You say that the Catholic Church created the situation that allowed that insensitive priest to speak so stupidly, and I wonder how the Catholic Church was supposed to be able to regulate this guy's stupidity. When I attended a U.S. Catholic seminary in the 1960s, all seminarians were required to take at least six months of fulltime Clinical-Pastoral Education, an intense program in hospitals that did all it could to teach future priests and other ministers to respond to such situations with compassion. I know dozens of Irish-born Catholic priests who were educated in seminaries in Ireland at the same time, and they were all trained to respond to tragedies with absolute compassion, just like I was. Some of them respond very well, some are mediocre, and some are assholes. Who's to blame for them being assholes?

Institutions are morally neutral. They can do neither right nor wrong. It's the people within the institutions that do the deeds, and it's people who deserve the credit or blame. Your approach is cockeyed. You see people in the church doing wrong, and you blame the church - and then you distribute that blame to all that belong to the church (former members, to your mind, are absolved). Your approach, Jim, is illogical and unfair - and it borders on bigotry. The underlying principle of bigotry is blaming the entire group for the misdeeds of a few members of that group. How does your approach differ from that?

-Joe Offer-