Catholic Church Should Be Brought to Its Knees

Jenny Bioche should spend fewer Fridays at Fashion Island with the “haves” of south Orange County and do more investigation into sexual child abuse, whether committed by parents, family members, educators, baby-sitters or clergy.

To suggest that teachers and parents were asleep at the wheel because they should have known is ludicrous. Rape victims hesitate coming forward, and battered women hold their tongues ... yet she expects children to speak out?

I, too, am a proud Roman Catholic. I have never felt stereotyped or that my religion was unfavorably portrayed. Bioche can bury her head in the sands of the Atrium at Fashion Island and refuse to believe that far too many priests are predators and that bishops covered up for them. The sheer numbers, admissions and documentation that predatory priests were moved from parish to parish speak for themselves.

I have not yet determined how I feel about priests marrying. But for Bioche to suggest that you must choose one profession, similar to deciding whether to be a doctor or lawyer because you can’t do both, is silly. Are the successful doctors and lawyers who are married considered dual-professionals?

If the church is brought to its knees in the search for truth and justice, perhaps it belongs there. It has much to repent for.

Joyce Lynch

Anaheim Hills

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Jenny Bioche puts the capital A in Apologetics. She epitomizes the Roman Catholic Church’s head-in-the-sand approach to solving problems. The church is fortunate in not having Bioche as legal counsel, for she’d dig it into a deeper mess.

Especially choice is her assertion that “ ... I don’t believe there was the intent to endanger children; I think the church didn’t know how to handle it.” What most people do when they don’t know how to “handle” something is to hire an expert. They shouldn’t have swept it under the rug for 30 years.

I don’t believe the church had any intention of endangering children, but in its attempt at self-preservation, children--lots of them--became victims. Bioche also displayed a puzzling lack of knowledge about her own church by stating that “allowing priests to marry can be problematic.” Evidently, she is unaware that married priests do exist in the Catholic Church. In the Eastern Rite, which is loyal to and in communion with Rome, priests may marry prior to ordination, and the Catholic Church accepted dozens of disaffected former Episcopal priests in the 1980s.

Both classes of married priests perform parochial duties, and I know of no reports or studies indicating these priests are less effective than their celibate peers. If removing the celibacy ban increased the abysmally low number of men entering the priesthood, the married priests would make up in numbers what they may lack in terms of availability.

James Sperber

San Juan Capistrano