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Web Letter

Effeminate altar boys who can be substituted for girls are often sodomized by heterosexual priests who find it difficult to form a secretive relationship with an adult female. Effeminate boys mixed in with an adult prison population would also be abused. The French Foreign Legion was famous for sexually abusing their water boys. It is true that a few homosexuals priests share the guilt, but most have enough sexual contact with adults. Sex-starved heterosexual priests often sodomize wig-wearing altar boys. The female adults in the parish are too dangerous to trust. They might blackmail the priest and have him defrocked. The rare vow-abiding priest has to shut the lights, and make love to his four sisters on Thumb Street. The homosexual priest is more fortunate. He has his choice of many masculine-looking adults who will gladly accept the opportunity to come out of the closet.

Web Letter

Great job, Katha. Catholicism is an odd institution; you are born into it and raised in it (not unlike Judaism: it's hard to reject it because its hold on your imagination and inner life is so tenacious) and, while there is much to celebrate in the church's beauty (think of the saints and the social justice teachings), so much needs changing and reformation. As a committed, devout Catholic, I am disgusted with the institutional church's behavior. I'd welcome the church losing its protected tax status. The behavior of the bishops in the last elections and during the healthcare debate was truly distressing and embarrassing. Thanks for a pointed critique! Happy Easter.

Web Letter

Thank you, Katha, for this article. I do detect a certain amount of anger, but it's only natural when, as women, so much of the legislation on our reproductive choices is based on the opinions of men who have never had to take care of children--many of whom, in fact, have been complicit in cover-up after cover-up, putting our children at terrible risk.

As a "recovering Catholic" myself, I am personally thankful that I no longer let the church make my decisions for me. There is only one honorable way out for Pope Benedict... any bets on whether or not he takes it?

Web Letter

Having a straitjacket (in the obstinate sense) feminist ideologue write an opinion article on the Roman Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal is about as objective as having Limberger Cheese comment on "Obamacare."

Editors, do I detect a note of... sarcasm by publishing this article on this particular day? Leave the sarcasm to the right--because that's all they have.

Web Letter

A better title: Public Indulgences.

The liberal might wonder whether child-abusing priests, when they were boys, were themselves abused. If they were, and even if it was only by way of what would now be the relatively harmless attitudes of their religious teachers, the fact of it should tell the liberal something about such common assumptions of his as the one that has it that "higher" education means a loftier citizenry (think: Bernie Madoff, Antonin Scalia, Nancy "it's for the children" Pelosi, Josef Mengele), or that (2) counselling is always to be preferred to incarceration or, God forbid, to the death penalty, and no matter the crime.

The Catholic Church today is what it's always wanted to be: a nation from which others could learn. Also, it's celibate, on its way to being perfectly without offspring, no longer burdened by a need to choose.