Good for you, Mo, to see you'd lived in these denials yourself.

It goes on around the world -- even in advanced, high-tech, consumer-rich countries such as the one where I live.

At a recent school assembly to welcome the new, first-year kids (all institutional life begins anew early April here), the school had twelve speakers lined up to give speeches. As it turned out, eleven were men. And the only woman appeared all dressed in ceremonial kimono -- as if even she wanted to admit that she knew a woman's most proper role is as ceremonial token.

When I proceeded to ask people afterward if they'd noted anything odd in this assembly, none did. No girls could recognize the skewed priorities for them, and their gender, as modeled before them.

To see one's culture, as Hemingway said -- as Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein taught him -- one has to get out of one's culture. But too many cultures around the world simply provide comfort zones, whence no one escapes.

Americans fancy their own churches, corporate silos, and consumer niches as empowering zones -- but thanks to your column today, perhaps more will question how too many yet live in massive denial, massively abetting the powers that be.

My Dear Ms. Dowd, my heart aches for you, as you walk through one of life’s greatest lessons: No priest or preacher should ever be confused with the presence of God. If there is any consolation, your journey is not unique, we have all had to walk this way. I was a young Catholic who became a Protestant and who was still almost molested by the Preacher as opposed to the Priest. When we grow and “if” we grow we learn that most of these so-called men of God wouldn’t recognize Jesus if He walked into their offices with a bleeding red cowboy hat one with stars circling His head. They are no more called by God than George W. Bush or Jeffrey Dahmer was called by God. They called themselves! It is a very painful lesson.

Your Pope is no more significant than my Bishop was to me when he scared me half to death by telling me he was in love with me. It is incumbent on us lay people that we grow up and realize that there is nowhere in the Bible that it says we must come through one of these people to communicate with God. It is our own fault because we were too lazy to read for ourselves and trusted these parasites to lead us. The Bible says there is none good, no, not one. All men were born in sin, even Priest, Bishops and yes….Popes too. It is my prayer for you that God will heal your pretty heart and you will resume your uncomplicated and very opinionated writings, while entertaining us, we do love to read your columns. Lord knows you are close to my beloved and dearly missed Molly Ivins and I do enjoy reading and commenting on your writings. Be well my dear perfect stranger, friend.

Maureen,

Sounds like you know what you need to do. Leave the Catholic Church. I did so years ago and have never regretted it. You're correct--Jesus embraced all the outsiders. Today, I have no doubt he would embrace women, gays, transgenders, and anyone not part of any church power structure. (And from my research, Paul would too. Ignore most of his letters--they were written by others in later years to repair the damage Paul would cause with his radical, inclusive message.)

There truly are no words to say how absolutely absurd and misrepresentative of Catholicism Ms Dowd is here... but why should we be surprised? If nothing else, this column is perfectly suited to demonstrate everything that is happening in the Church today-- we are being purged of progressive, modernist, liberal nonsense that has no place in the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Thus, we rejoice in these difficulties and trials as we support our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. Long live the Pope!

Great column, Maureen. Years ago, my mother, a practicing Catholic and mother of seven, told me she couldn't stand Ratzinger. She knew nothing about his protection of child molesting priests back then, but detested his extremely conservative interpretation of Catholic orthodoxy. "The priests romanticize having children," she scoffed. Indeed, there's something warped about the Catholic leadership. The more they idealize the Virgin Mary, the worse they treat actual women and children.

I admire Ms. Dowd's moral courage and perseverance in this Byzantine morality play. She's defending the defenseless against the indefensible. I hope her outrage will reach outside religious circles sufficiently to breathe a healthier puff of white smoke.

Maureen, your problem is that as a Catholic and like the Muslim women with whom you spoke, you are seeking a rational response from a belief system which is inherently irrational.

Religious faith is a retreat from reason and logic; it is at its base simply magic thinking - irrational superstition systematized. The fact that Catholicism and Islam are male-dominated and contemptuous of women is not the point - a reasoned response can't be expected from any organization which rejects reason and embraces mysticism and superstition. There is no such thing as faith-based reasoning which is consistent with reality.

Mo, dear, give it a rest because this is nothing new. The Catholic Church has been marked by scandle of kind or another - with depressing regularity - for the past 1,600 years.

If I recall correctly, exactly this kind of child abuse prompted France and Germany to distance themselves from the church in the 19th Century. Nothing is going to change and the church's bottom line seems to be that accepting it is just part of being a Catholic.

I think here of the woman at the well, who spoke with Jesus. She was a Samaritan as well as a woman, a race and gender despised by most of the people of Israel. Yet she had spunk, was clearly a seeker of truth. Jesus didn't hesitate to speak with her. In fact, she was the first evangelist. If she had been silenced by her people, they would have missed hearing and knowing him.

When leaders of any group become a homogenous club, they think first of preserving that club. The Church's leaders are all men, and women and children are not in that club. What words of God might they have missed, silencing the women (and children) at the well?

Maureen
Thank you for not letting this issue die. I left the priesthood in 1981 for the very issues you address that negating women is at the heart of most of the churches problems. And though I had not thought of it in this way the cover up of child molestation would not have been institutionalized if we could have had a few strong women in positions of authority. The church has suffered much in it's progress toward wholeness, it will suffer this and will survive even stronger for having dealt with it.

It is interesting to see whether the public can stand up and be counted on this one. Our institutions are
are built on systems in which everything serves the interest of power. Religion has always maintained the position that it is above the law. Child molestation is so odious that one cannot fathom the self protective position of the church. It is as if by admission of the crime, the house of cards comes falling down.

Spirtuality is something pure, something good and a gift from God. This is something else.

Ratzinger needs to resign. It's becoming more and more clear that the only reason he was elected in the first place was that he apparently knows where the bodies are buried.

Maybe it's time for the next Pope to be elected from outside of the ranks of the College of Cardinals. Perhaps even a lay Pope. Perhaps even a married Pope. With kids.

To continue to use the word "molest" to describe what these perverted priests did to children is to trivialize and obscure their crimes, much as the Church has done. To molest, according to my dictionary, is to make annoying sexual advances to. In some cases, maybe the priests merely molested children, but having spoken with actual victims of these priests, they did more than mere molestation. These priests raped children. They raped girl children and they anally raped boy children. Rape is a felony and the Catholic Church is guilty of obstructing justice and misprision of felonies. Any priest, bishop, cardinal or pope involved in the crimes or their coverup needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

As a child I was dragged to Catholic Church and at a very young age, noticed that the priests and bishops and popes were always male. I decided very young that the Church was bizarre and did not like women, and so there was no point in my liking or believing them. It was never clear why more women did not reach this conclusion or take this stance, as the male domination of the Church and its ideology of male supremacy were obvious for all, even the eyes of a child, to see.

I left the Catholic Church, for good and forever, the summer Marilyn Monroe died. That spring I'd graduated from my 12 years of twice a week catechism classes, received my diploma, and got extra credit for having the highest grades. I didn't care about the catechism awards. It was enough I never had to sit through another soul-killing session. What was the point of memorizing all that stuff?

When I was very young I thought that praying the rosary would give me wings so I could fly. Once I accepted disappointing reality, I looked for something else in the Church that I could believe in and found Jesus of Nazareth, Rebel and Free-Thinker. To this day I can't figure out how Jesus morphed into Joe Rat singer. I mean, did Jesus wear silk? Not hardly.

So, that summer of 1962, I was on the edge of leaving the Church because it was a lot of puffery to me, but for my mother's sake I had to give it one more try. I signed on to be a counselor at the local Catholic Youth Organization camp. That was an eye-opener. If I thought my fellow counselors were going to be like pious, but questioning, me, I was totally wrong. Every night, after the kiddies were tucked in and we were back in our barracks, the girls talked about getting drunk and having sex. I couldn't believe Catholic girls had sex before marriage. Wasn't that a sin? And weren't we supposed to be examples of some sort? I'd brought a very nice white missal and read it when I wasn't listening to my campmates describe all the things you can do in the back seat of a car. I was looking for faith-hope-charity in that little white book, but soon realized I wasn't going to find it there.

I was into Jesus as a real person who was kind, generous, and loving - not Jesus as a god or 1/3rd of a god, so I asked the camp priest if we could talk. He gave me a time to meet and when I walked into his room I saw two chairs sitting in the middle of the floor, back to back. I told him I didn't want confession, but he didn't know what to do about the chairs, so we sat with our backs to each other while I told him what I was thinking. There was no discussion, he just dismissed me with orders for some Hail Marys and Our Fathers and maybe an Act of Contrition. When I walked out of that room the Church seemed small and blind and inconsequential. I thought I might be free.

Then Marilyn Monroe died. We counselors gathered in a little group and talked about it and I remember feeling overwhelmed that Marilyn Monroe could actually die. And then the nuns came over to us. We told them how upset we were. They said we shouldn't be upset by Marilyn Monroe's death because she deserved it. But I knew Jesus would be upset.
And that's when I left the Catholic Church.

I attended Mass with my wife and four-year-old son this past Christmas and found myself utterly appalled (I have no idea why now, suddenly, this occurred to me) by the undeniable, in-your-face second-class citizenship of women. I call myself a Catholic, but my idea of the real church is rooted in the hopes and ideals of Vatican II. My wife and I were married in the Catholic church, and our son was baptized in the Catholic church. I hold out hope that folks like Joan Chittister, Mary C, Gordon, James Carroll, and Andrew Sullivan are correct: this church hierarchy is not the church, and the church as we know it can and will evolve out of this dark period. Lots must change, and God willing, it will. The first two are full acceptance of women in *all* roles (priest, bishop, cardinal, pope) and doing away with the morally corrosive culture of blind obedience. The other changes will follow....

As a Catholic woman, part of me wants to scream: "Nooooooooo, this cannot be." While I agree with most of Maureen's opinions about the patriarchal church and have even experienced the antiquated rules of religious life that were finally expunged by Pope John XXIII, I am dismayed by the thought that some will use her positions as ammunition to attack our very foundations as a religion.

There have always been strong women in the life of the church who have admonished popes, founded orders of religious women to minister to the strays of this world, written books, and otherwise led by example.

I also do not think it is fair to compare the treatment of women in the church with the way women are treated in the Islamic world. We do not get stoned to death for commiting adultury, for example.

Joseph Ratzinger is a man of his times, when the church kept its secrets for fear of being persecuted. That is not far fetched. One of the oldest Catholic churches in Philadelphia, Old Saint Joseph's, had to be built hidden in an alley for fear of being burned to the ground.

So there is reason behind the defenseiveness. Was that defensiveness excessive and dangerous? Apparently so. But we have to find a way to cleanse this stain without throwing the whole body of the church down the sewer, as some would do in a heartbeat.

As a Catholic of over 50 years, including 12 years of a very liberal and humanistic Catholic education which has made me a fairly decent and moral person, I view the Church intractibility on child molestation and its refusal to address the victims and remove the offending priests from ministering to any members as a portent of a religion which is so insulated from reality and protectionist as a portent of a religion in serious decline. It seems to have forgotten the mission statement outlined by Jesus. It seems no longer relevant in a world where women are now considered real human beings (and starting to be allowed to be ministers in other faiths)and most ministers in other faiths are allowed to marry and have children which is the natural order of things in most human lives.

Two thumbs down. I've lived in Saudi Arabia for 17 years, and I find it strange how after a trip there you compare the Catholic Church to it. First of all, how can an institution be compared to a country's social and political system? I find it unnerving how you seem to be going to any length just to attack the Catholic Church, and I really do not see the connection between the two.

The Catholic Church is not perfect, but it is one of the pillars of Western civilization. It has a lot of work to do and constructive criticism would be better appreciated then just an all out attack on the Church.

Knowing how devoted Ms. Dowd is to her faith, this must have been one of the more difficult columns to write during her distinguished career. Until today, I sometimes thought that Ms Dowd's catholicism got in the way of her reasoning. No more. Kudos to you, \ms. Dowd

Thank you Ms Dowd for your insightful columns regarding the RC Church scandalous behaviour. As a Catholic woman I am deeply disturbed and angry with how events have unfolded. The condescension of this old men's powerful club is infuriating. My grandfather was a deeply religious man and theologist who studied 18 years to become a Jesuit priest, and before taking his final vows decided to leave the Church and start a family. I remember asking him why he had a change of heart, and he replied "I left the Church because nobody believes in God after becoming a bishop". I think I now understand exactly what he meant. He lost respect. And so have I.

During five years of catholic seminary education (9 years is required), I was constantly bombarded with classes, workshops and retreats on being a healthy celibate by sublimating sexual desire for physical activity, intimacy in friendships, and devotion to the priestly life.

Ultimately, I left priestly formation because I had come to two conclusions: 1) obedience within despotic government inevitably leads to stagnation, corruption and rebellion, and 2) mandated celibacy leads to painful and unnatural behavioral consequences, enshrinement/victimization of the weak, and a permanently convoluted value system.

Combine these two and you have the failure of the Church to remain relevant in the modern world, except as a sanctuary for the suffering (in exchange for their exploitation) and an impediment to the advancement of our species into a more just and equitable society.

Truth being told, again and again, Maureen! Brava, my sister!
Growing up with a loving and powerful mother and three older sisters in an Irish-Catholic house has made my perceptions of the world more empathetic, caring and whole.
But watching the church of my childhood self-destruct from intellectual and moral sclerosis by denying the wholehearted inclusion of women in every facet of church life is like watching a kind of viral, institutional thinking kill the host, no pun intended.
Keep on shining your light!

In our resolutely PC society it is possible to criticize only one religion--Roman Catholic. If Ms. Dowd or any of the mainly vile and hate-filled commentators above had written such words about any other variant of Christianity or much less the Islamic, Jewish or Buddhist faiths, there would be a huge backlash of outrage at the intolerance. Of the 72 previous writers, there are only an handful that are not obvious radical feminists pursuing their agenda,lapsed Catholics justifying their loss of faith, or atheists cashing in on an opportunity to spread their ideas. All of these abuse cases were decades old, the Church and its leaders have apologized for their failures to act then, have paid out huge sums to the victims, and have put in place
a system to stop abuse from occurring except rarely and in such cases the abusers are immediately turned over to law enforcement as they should be. Wherever there are children there will be those tempted to abuse them -- in all religions and among the non-religious as well. To use this disease to castigate one religion is simply unfair. To use it to attack the pope, who has done nothing wrong, is beyond unfair.

Another shocking aspect to the whole scandal is that the Pope and the Church seem to have no faith in God. Believing in an all knowing God means you cannot hide from him. It also means that you must do what is right even if it will be difficult in this life because he is watching and you will be judged. I would think the Pope would have faith that if he did what was right God would protect the one true faith and see them through these difficult times. However he seems to have fear bad press more than he fears God. Makes you wonder if they really believe.

Many of the American nuns who do so much good in their communities have been menaced by Rome for their modern dress and determined activism, and chided by their cold-blooded and deeply politicized bishops for such revolutionary acts as supporting health care reform. These good sisters show tremendous courage in the face of tremendous from the Vatican, which seems to want to take them back to a time when nuns were silent, subservient, and as heavily veiled as any woman of the Taliban. While all religion seems madness to me, I do have abiding respect for people who, calling themselves Christian, actually attempt to BE Christian, dedicating their lives to peace, charity, humility and service. There aren't many of them in any faith. These brave women deserve more from their Church, as do all Catholic women who struggle to live their faith in a meaningful way despite the medieval indignities heaped upon them from birth.