How to eliminate the rotten apples is what we don't know, Smokey - because it's so hard to predict which ones are going to be the rotten apples. One thing we can do is follow the example of the Boy Scouts and eliminate situations where adults are alone with children. We do that in my parish. I have my differences with my pastor, but he does many things very well. He hears kids' confessions out in the open, in a pew in the corner of the church. In the parish school my kids attended, they hired an adult teacher's aid for every classroom.

But I don't know if you can eliminate child abusers, because they are very clever and finding ways to get access to children. I've interviewed a number of child molesters and abusers in the course of my employment as a government investigator. If I hadn't known their history, there was no way I would have suspected that anything was wrong with them. They're uniformly glib and charming and convincing - that's how they get kids to go along with them.

The trouble is, the bad ones get the press coverage. Somebody ought to write a book about my boss Sister Judy, who spent 14 years hanging out with homeless people at the reception center of a soup kitchen. She took a two-year vacation in the middle of it to work with refugees in Rwanda. She came back with parasites, "But they weren't too bad," she says. Now she's executive director of the women's center where I work, providing breakfast and hospitality and a social center for women who want to get aways from poverty for an hour or a morning. Judy has been a nun for 50 years, and she's a joy to work with.

I don't know Sister Libby very well, but she's in her mid-40's and a real dynamo. She's now the director of the soup kitchen where Judy worked. The soup kitchen got on the Oprah Winfrey Show a few months ago, and Libby is using that publicity to leverage her way into permanent housing for the homeless in Sacramento. Both Judy and Libby have been arrested at demonstrations on occasion.

These are two of the most amazing women I know, but I've known hundreds of Catholic activists that are just as remarkable. They don't deserve to be lumped together with the child molesters.


-Joe-