Mr. Carroll, your impassioned exhortations are ninety percent rhetoric, and ten percent truth - and the examples you use as "proof," while mostly truthful, are 100 percent irrelevant.

The child molestation scandal is indeed a scandal, and it should never have happened. However, there is no evidence that its occurrence is significantly higher among priests, than it is among the male population in general.

And, as I have said so many times before, institutions such as the mother and baby homes and industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries, no longer exist. Your suggestion that a museum be built to tell the story of how people suffered in these institutions, is a good one.

As for the sex obsession, that was another age. Certainly some vestiges remain, but the Catholic Church is mostly out of its Victorian attitudes about sex. As for homosexuality and homosexual marriage, church attitudes seem to be slowly coming around, as they are in the population in general. If you want proof, go to the Vatican Website and look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church and other documents, and take note of how few of the materials there have anything to do with sex. Time to update your stereotypes, Jim.

You say, "The church today - certainly here in Ireland - is fighting tooth-and-nail to maintain it's right to educate children."

[I should make a comment here that if nothing else, I learned the correct use of the apostrophe in Catholic school.]

Now, your statement is hard for me as an American to understand. I chose to send my kids to Catholic schools, and I paid every penny of the cost of their education. The primary reason for my choice was that Catholic schools offered an education that I thought was far better than that offered in tax-supported schools (which I paid for but didn't use). My children had some contact with priests and nuns in school, but most of their teachers were lay people.

Now, what is it about the setup of schools in Ireland that makes Catholic schools objectionable to you? Why shouldn't parents have the right to choose to send their children to whatever school they choose? Because of the history of the institutions in the first half of the twentieth century? Why not evaluate the current record of Catholic schools in Ireland, instead of dwelling on past history?

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Unnamed guest, whoever you are, you say: Your actions are clearly virtuous in and of themselves and have no effect on the moral values of others of your fellowship. They would be equally virtuous if performed by a followwer of another religion, an agnostic, or an atheist. They give no credit beyond the do-er of the deed, it's not Rome which makes you moral, but you. That may come from your inmost faith, but as Matt 5-8 points out, that is intrinsic to you and nothing to do with your Church. Your Church does not make you virtuous, nor your virtue the Church, nor is it exclusive to Roman Catholicism.

The Germans might respond, "Na und?" (And so?). Please tell me when I have ever claimed that the Catholic Church is virtuous. Some of its members are virtuous, and some are not. Therefore, one has to evaluate the individuals. It is a fallacy to issue a blanket condemnation of the Catholic Church as a whole (as you have done), for that is the essence of bigotry.

-Joe-