To the editors.

Hercules!

Thank you for Grant Gallicho's informative interview with James Post, president of Voice of the Faithful ("Are the Bishops Listening?" June 6). Gallicho asked pointed questions and Post seemed up to them.

Post is emerging as a real leader, and, after reading the interview, I am more inclined to work with VOTF. Post is honing his words for maximum effect. For example, he states: "We have given thousands of Catholics a reason to stay in the church. We have absorbed the faithful's anger at the hierarchy and turned it into a positive force for change."

Post seems to understand the herculean nature of his task and has some realistic ideas about what to do. This is inspiring and encouraging.

BILL MAZZELLA

Yonkers, N.Y.

Adrift

John T. McGreevy's "The Fog of Scandal" (May 23) is indeed groundbreaking. Still, I take issue on two points.

First, he dismisses the idea that celibacy had any role in the pedophile scandal by citing "what we now know of sexual abuse in families." Fifty years of experience as a priest, with access to intimate family problems, paints a different picture for me. Abuse in families is almost always heterosexual, directed at girls.

As a supervisory chaplain in the military, I was puzzled that I had no cases of pedophilia to deal with among Protestant chaplains. All were by Catholics who had a background of strict training and self-sacrifice. I was less surprised as I observed that Protestant chaplains had a home life. They had responsibility to a wife and family who monitored this duty. Catholic chaplains, on the other hand, were relatively adrift. In civilian life, too, the Protestant ministry does not have the pedophilia problem that exists among Catholic priests, a fact ludicrously avoided by defenders of the status quo.

Second, bishops were not as guilty as McGreevy and other essayists on this subject assume. What was a bishop to do? Rome would not allow him to pension off and dispense a pedophile. Therapists gave assurance that a cure had been effected. Added to this, the repentance and humiliation suggested no further trouble. All added up to giving the priest a new chance. Even with the pressure to find a place for the man, no bishop would assign a priest he knew would abuse again.

(REV.) CONNELL J. MAGUIRE

Riviera Beach, Fla.

Unintended consequences

Regarding John McGreevy's "The Fog of Scandal," a historical interpretation of the sexual-abuse scandal might take a more severe direction than McGreevy seemed willing to take. For example:

The bishops (the hierarchy) have finally done it to themselves: they've placed the Catholic Church foursquare in the historical movement of the Reformation. By aiding and abetting the moral decay of priests, by their arrogance and deception, and by their stifling anti-intellectualism, they have accelerated the development of the "posthierarchical" church.

Most baptized Catholics (at least American and European) disdain the authoritarian tradition of the church and ignore its utterances, strictures, and tedious requirements for participating in its sacraments. Today's young Catholics live together out of wedlock, use contraception, support prochoice legislation, and hardly ever attend Mass. Yet many still identify themselves as Catholic.

My hope is for an enlivened, post-hierarchical Body of Christ, full of secure, unfearing faith and love, and intellectual inquiry into and discussion of issues that are now dreaded or forbidden (female and married priests, gay marriage, the truth and legitimacy of other religions). I hope the bishops can muster some humility and courage and contribute to that end. Otherwise, they may be left out completely.

HENRY A. SMITH

Yorba Linda, Calif.

Deception on Iraq

I read with great interest the exchange (Correspondence, May 23) between Jean Bethke Elshtain and her critics about justification for war in Iraq.

Recent reports in the New York Times and on National Public Radio place the war in a wholly different context. It is beginning to look as if our decision to go to war was based on defective intelligence--including at least one story that alleged Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger, a story which had been established as a forgery by reports to the CIA and the State Department in February 2002.

Clearly, something went badly wrong in the administration's decision-making process. It seems as though the president decided to invade Iraq on information that was defective at best, manipulated, or deceptive at worst.

It is no answer to say that the invasion of Iraq was a good thing because we rid the world of a bloody tyrant. The point is that the war was justified to the American people and the world community on grounds that Iraq was acquiring weapons of mass destruction [WMD], which posed a grave threat to the United States. As White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on April 10, WMD "are what this war was about" (reported by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, May 6).

Yet Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize WMD was taken for "bureaucratic reasons ... because it was the one reason everyone could agree on" (reported by Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 30). This brings me to the one just-war criterion on which I think everyone agrees: the stated reasons for going to war must be genuine, and not a pretext. It looks very much as if the invasion of Iraq violated that criterion, if it violated no other. I am not sure why the administration wanted to take us into war, but it is becoming harder every day to believe that the stated reasons were genuine.

JEAN PORTER

South Bend, Ind.

Gay priests

I enjoyed Anonymous's "Made in God's Image" (April 11), but not the subsequent letter from Stephen Court (Correspondence, May 23). He too lightly dismisses sexual orientation as "mere" and the anonymous author's powerful telling of his experience as "whining." Then Court introduces prejudice against women and the policy against ordaining married men as somehow in competition with homophobia as the most painful and unjust situation. It is not helpful to compare or rate injustices and suffering. Court misses the point of the article: it did not diminish the aspirations or gifts of women or married people. Rather, the essay challenged Christians to increase the reach of their compassion and desire to understand others.

I must also comment on Court's last sentence: he's right to say that "pedophilia [and the sexual abuse of minors] in the priesthood" is a scandal. Homosexuality in the priesthood is not: It's simply a reality. Anonymous provides one example of a priest who takes that reality and makes a healthy, full life--a gift to the church.

JOHN MCHUGH

Philadelphia, Pa.