WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

No one can accuse me of being hasty.

But after a lifetime of stubborn adherence on my part and criminal behavior on yours, your excellencies, you seem to have finally succeeded in driving me away. I’m not even sure there’s such a thing as a former Catholic, but I’m about to find out.

My hopes for the Baltimore meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops weren’t ever high, because fool me 6,000 times, shame on you. But that 6,001st time, well, I’m just all out of willingness to be conned into believing that you — who’ve so long seen the devastation of innocents principally as a PR problem — are ever going to change. …

The men who run the church continue to think so well of one another that I sometimes wonder whether they have met. … When and if the bishops do fully rouse themselves, I won’t be in the pews to hear about it.

I am a true-believing, rosary- and novena-praying graduate of St. Mary’s Elementary School, the University of Notre Dame and l’Universite catholique de Louvain in Belgium. I covered the Vatican for The New York Times and was a fellow at the Catholic University of America’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies. I never thought it would come to this.

Melinda Henneberger, USA Today