Well, Greg, I'm certainly an American Catholic, but I don't think that's the defining factor. I'm an educated Catholic. I got 16 years of education in Catholic schools, and my college major in the seminary was Theology - taught by professors who got their licenses to teach from Rome.

The term "Cafeteria Catholic" hits all my hot buttons. It was coined by the fundamentalist Catholics in an attempt to exclude others from their own narrow, legalistic view of Catholicism. I'll admit it's a catchy term, and it has caught on universally and wrought its intended damage very well. Even non-Catholics and former Catholics view the Catholic Church through this narrow, legalistic perspective - they rightly reject this idea of church, but I contend that what they are rejecting is a false perception of a church that doesn't exist. St. Thomas Aquinas is acclaimed as the greatest theologian the Catholic Church has ever produced (though I suppose some might give Augustine that title). I'm sure Thomas Aquinas would earn the title "Cafeteria Catholic" if he were alive today. It's the same exclusionary tactic George Bush uses when he says if you're not with us, you're against us.

I guess I more-or-less agree with the "facts" you have proposed, but I think you've put some unnecessary "spin" on them ("Hall of Shame," "Rogues Gallery" of bishops). All of the problems you speak of occurred, but I submit that they are far less widespread than you contend. I've argued against all of those problems you speak about, and I know many priests and nuns and Catholic publications who have done the same.

But let's take the child abuse problem, the reparation for the crimes committed by between two and five percent of the priests in the Catholic Church. In my diocese, the policy was to pay the victim $25,00 to $50,000 for pain and suffering, provide counseling or psychiatric treatment for the victim, and suspend a first-offender priest for six months to a year and send him to a residential treatment center that promised to cure the priest of his sexual problem - just like residential alcoholism treatment centers claimed to be able to cure people of those addictions. The problem was taken seriously - it's just that the solution didn't work. The current solution is to banish an offender from society and find a deep pocket that will pay the victim a million dollars. Does the new solution work any better than the old? Should the members of my parish have to cough up a million dollars to make reparation for an offense some priest committed thirty years ago? Is it immoral for a bishop to attempt to get off paying $25,000 instead of a million bucks in reparations that won't heal the victim anyhow?

Nobody has found a solution for the terrible crime of child molestation, which is committed by countless males from all walks of life - but most of those males don't have employers who have been forced to pay a million dollars for an employee's crime. Yes, the Catholic Church handled the child abuse situation badly - but no other institution or corporation has found a way to consistently handle such a situation well.

Nobody has found a way to deal with child abuse. Nobody has found a "good" solution. But lacking a "good" solution, does that mean that bishops who clumsily stumble their way through the problem are "bad"? How would you solve the problem? Pay five million a victim and put all Catholics in hock for three generations?

As for the abortion thing. The statistics show that Catholic women get abortions as frequently as non-Catholic women do. While I do believe that the Catholic Church needs to come to a more reasonable and realistic position on abortion and birth control, I doubt that the church has the ability to actually interfere in the birth control and abortion decisions made by most Catholic women. Catholic lay people, even those in third world countries, are not the mindless automatons you make them out to be. The anti-abortion campaign is ludicrous and ineffective. The Catholic Church as an institution is not as deeply involved in the embarrassing tactics of the anti-abortionists as you might think - even though the church is certainly opposed to abortion. Yes, certain bishops (my own included) have done some anti-abortion grandstanding that is inappropriate or worse - but many of their priests (and most of their nuns) disagree with them. There are compassionate ways to reduce the number of abortions that may be far more effective than the storm-trooper tactics of the anti-abortion fanatics. I contend that Planned Parenthood may do far more to prevent abortions than the Catholic Church does because Planned Parenthood promotes responsible family planning - but I don't expect the Catholic Church to ally itself with Planned Parenthood any time soon.

I have to say, Greg, that I hate acronyms. How many people reading this thread are going to understand that VOTF means Voice of the Faithful and CTA means Call to Action? These are abbreviations for two American organizations that seek to reform the Catholic Church. I don't belong to either, but I attend Call to Action conventions and I'm on their mailing lists. I generally support the activities of Call to Action, although it is not as narrowly focused and as anti-establishment as outsiders might think.

You seem to say the only proper response to the problems of the Catholic Church is to leave it. I'm not ready to do that. It's MY church, and my family has been Catholic as far back as anybody can trace (although we suspect we have some Jewish ancestors nobody admits to). I know the problems of the Church, and I work almost every day to try to find solutions to those problems. But no, I'm not ready to abandon my church to the fundamentalists and the child molestors.

-Joe-