Christianity, Evolution, Atheists, Social Divisions, and Not Going Nuts

 

This blog is about Christianity and Evolution, but it's also about COVID and loneliness, and the West's current tectonic fracture between extremists on all sides.

 

In October, 2020, I reviewed James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose's "Cynical Theories," a book about left-wing extremism. I gave the book a mostly positive review. Readers have made "Cynical Theories" Amazon's number one bestseller in its category. James Lindsay is a frequent guest on YouTube channels addressing left-wing extremism; see here.

 

Helen Pluckrose is editor of Areo, an online magazine dedicated to Atheism, reason, and human rights.

 

I faulted "Cynical Theories" for its Christophobia. As I wrote,

 

"Cynical Theories" would have been a better book without its Christophobia. Helen Pluckrose self-identifies as a New Atheist. James Lindsay is author of "Everybody Is Wrong about God." People who believe in God "have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet," his book contends. Lindsay and Pluckrose's colleague, Peter Boghossian, is another "New Atheist." Boghossian is author of "A Manual for Creating Atheists."

 

Lindsay and Pluckrose denigrate Christianity, slur Judaism – "The Bible is filled with tribalism" – and barely mention the Greeks. Lindsay and Pluckrose's lost Eden is their, highly doctored, take on the Enlightenment. This glorious age, they recount, gave us something called "liberalism," and liberalism is the panacea. Evidently, liberalism popped, through parthenogenesis, fully formed out of Zeus's head, as did the ancient Greek goddess Athena. News flash: babies are not born that way. They don't pop out of males' heads. Similarly, historical eras don't pop fully formed out of the mind of Baruch Spinoza.

 

I wished that I could convey to Lindsay and Pluckrose: Millions of Christians and Jews want to be your allies in the battle for Western Civilization and against hateful extremism. I even emailed the authors, but received no reply.

 

I asked Areo, Pluckrose's magazine, if they'd review my book. I hoped that by reading the book, they would see that Christians and Jews are allies in the battle against extremism.  

 

What I hoped for did not happen. Their book reviewer did not see the book as an invitation to ally-ship between Atheists and People of Faith for the good of Western Civilization. Their book reviewer wrote that "God through Binoculars," should really be called. "God through Blinkers," that is, blinders, the devices put on horses so that they can't see and be panicked by what they see. I can't see, of course, because I believe in God. That belief renders me blind. And I'm analogous to a horse, a dumb animal. (Apologies to any horse fans reading this.)

 

The reviewer sent me an email inviting me to an exchange with him via a medium called "Letter." The entire exchange can be seen at this link. In the reviewer's penultimate letter to me, he referred to Christians, indiscriminately, as murderers, rapists, and torturers, and said that Christians are blind liars who ignore the evil in the Bible and get their morality from Atheists.

 

I would never speak to him that way about Atheists. I don't think that way about Atheists. I'm not a deluded bigot. I don't generally invite people to dialogue and then trash their minds, their ethics, and their core beliefs. And accuse them of wholesale torture lasting for centuries. But then I was a Girl Scout so maybe I'm just too darn polite.

 

After I read the Atheist reviewer's penultimate comment to me, I went for a walk to Garret Mountain and I cried.

 

I'm really lonely. Like, if I were not as strong as I am, I would have gone nuts by now. I lost my adjunct job because of low enrollment. I haven't taught since last May – almost a year. I live alone. I have been obedient to all COVID restrictions, which means I haven’t talked to another human being in a really long time.

 

And, even when I do have other human beings to talk to, it's rare for me to find anyone who wants to talk about what I want to talk about. I remember a former internet friend, Charlie Fabrizio Ryan. Charlie and I would go on *for days* talking about one movie. Scenes, lighting, the significance of hair styles, ambivalent lines of dialogue. Charlie died almost twenty years ago and, though I never met him in person, I miss him with all my heart. And, of course, my sister Antoinette. Books, science, politics – she could talk and talk and talk. I miss that.

 

I used to be able to have conversations before and after class with my students. I miss that, too.

 

So, yeah, I cried because I am lonely and here was another human connection that ended up as a herpes sore.

 

I cried because I wondered what I did wrong.

 

I cried because what happened between me and the Atheist book reviewer is a microcosm of what's going on in the macrocosm. We are all so divided now. I don't need to tell you that. Everyone is handing everyone else litmus tests. Are you a Trump supporter? If so, I don't want to know you, or, if not, I don't want to know you. And the left hands out its litmus tests, too. Do you not support abortion on demand or the banning of Dr Seuss or men in women's bathrooms? BE GONE SCUM.

 

The Atheist wanted, in our Letter exchange, to talk about evolution. In his review of "God through Binoculars," the reviewer implied that I am too stupid, or, again, blinded by Christian faith, to understand evolution, or that I had not read enough, or that I had not read the right authors, or that I was dismissing evolution, and that I needed him and Richard Dawkins to education me.

 

In fact I explicitly state that I do believe in evolution. Why couldn't he see that? I think it's because his prejudices against people of faith are so strong that he can't see. Blinders, ya know?

 

What else do I say about evolution in "God through Binoculars"? Maybe what I said would be more clear if I didn't talk about evolution at all.

 

In his 1960 book "Synchronicity," Carl Jung wrote,

 

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window.

 

Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.

 

It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient’s animus, which was steeped in Cartesian philosophy and clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that the efforts of three doctors–I was the third–had not been able to weaken it.

 

EVIDENTLY SOMETHING QUITE IRRATIONAL WAS NEEDED which was beyond my powers to produce. THE DREAM ALONE WAS ENOUGH to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. But when the “scarab” came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armor of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move

 

A woman was stuck in a tight-ass, materialistic, rigid worldview. Jung, her therapist, recognized that she required "something quite irrational" – a minor miracle – to break out of that worldview. And a scarab came knocking at the window, even as she described to Jung being given a scarab in a dream. This was a turning point in her therapy.

 

Do I know how the scarab flew in the window? I'm not engineer, but I'm sure an engineer could explain the aerodynamics of scarab beetle flight. Do I think there was anything supernatural about Jung, his chair, her therapy? No.

 

This: how did all that come together to change this woman's life? "It's just coincidence," the Atheist would say. I am less satisfied with that answer. I've experienced synchronicity myself, and I describe incidents in "God through Binoculars." None of those incidents imply that I don't believe in the basic physics and science of real life. But they do boggle my mind. Meeting the man I call The Theologian on the road, what he said to me – it boggles my mind.

 

I wrote to someone smarter than either me or the Atheist book reviewer. Dr. Francis Collins lead the Human Genome Project that decoded the human genome.

 

Dear Francis,

 

Recently an Atheist reviewed "God through Binoculars."

 

The review shocked me. He says that I make a "God of the gaps" argument re: evolution. Again, that's totally not true.

 

What I do say in the book is this: I was taught evolution in Catholic school. I believe in evolution.

 

I spend all my free time in nature. I read about the plants and animals I see.

 

Though I respect and believe in evolution, I cannot believe, and nothing would convince me of, the idea that life as we know it occurred by chance.

 

I remember reading your book "The Language of God." I read a library copy so I no longer have a copy.

 

If I remember correctly, and I may not be, you mention that we have junk DNA that corresponds to similar useless DNA in chimps. This seems a pretty strong proof for our descending from common ancestors.

 

I have no problem with that.

 

What I say in "God through Binoculars" is that I can't believe that this all occurred merely by chance.

 

By "this all" I'm not just talking about the noun, living things, I'm talking about the verb, the process, "evolution."

 

I feel similarly about purely physical phenomena. Water, for example, amazes me. Its properties, its abilities, how it meshes with our needs.

 

It's not that I don't understand how water works. To some extent, for a non scientist, I do. I still regard water and its properties as miraculous.

 

My last email to you was about virus replication. I'm totally blown away by viruses. How and why do they do what they do? I don't mean that in the  sense of the "spike protein seeks a receptive spot ... hijacks the cell's reproductive mechanism ... "

 

I mean that in the sense of "What is going on here? Why is the virus doing this? Why are our bodies responding as they do? Who wrote this rulebook? What is the endgame?"

 

It's all well and good to say, "It's just a mindless process," but that doesn't really provide any answers, does it? That seems like more of a cop out.

 

Even the dark side of life astounds me, and leaves me with more questions than answers. To me, "evolution" is merely a flashlight in a vast landscape, and it doesn't provide enough light.

 

My question for you is, am I "allowed" to think this and not be, as the Areo critic makes me out to be, a simple-minded, obscurantist, religious idiot? You can say "yes" if the answer is really yes.

 

Francis, someone I really don't know but who is kind enough to respond to my very occasional emails, wrote back. Here's a line from his reply. "I can heartily agree with you that all the science that the world ever allows us to discern will not take the awe away from creation, or the marvel at its beauty."

 

So there, Atheist book reviewer. Someone smarter than you or I on the topic of evolution shares my sense of wonder.

 

I'll close with the following anecdote.

 

Some scientists met with God. They excitedly and proudly informed God that they had finally created life from scratch. God was no longer needed. Science had finally upstaged and outdated God.

 

God listened carefully to their PowerPoint presentation. It had begun with this phrase, "Just like you, God, we began with some dust."

 

God politely interrupted. "Uh, uh, uh," God gently chided. "You're cheating. Now go and get your own dust."

Woody Allen, Atheist Rapists, Nazis, and Whether or Not Conversation is Possible

 

Dear Daniel,

 

Daniel, you wrote "you do defend the Church … and go off on tangents, such as the relationship of the Church with Nazism, which have little to do with the direct personal experiences your memoir describes."

 

Not true. And, alas, you missed a big chunk of why the book exists.

 

I'll summarize God through Binoculars. I was a poor, dyslexic, cleaning lady. I did something such folk rarely do: went to a prestigious grad school and got a PhD and applied for tenure-track jobs.

 

At every turn, as a grad student and as a job-seeker, powerful people communicated to me that I am unwanted in the Ivory Tower exactly because I am Polish-American, I am poor and white, and I am Catholic. Finally, as a job-seeker, it was communicated to me that being Catholic and all those other nasty identities pretty much doomed my job search, along with a job market flooded with PhDs who couldn't find tenure-track jobs.

 

I've seen statistics that show that Christians and "political conservatives," sometimes a code word for Christians, are underrepresented both among students on elite college campuses and among faculty. I have read accounts of professors who were all but hired and then axed when it was discovered that they were devout Christians. I have witnessed this kind of anti-Christian bigotry first hand from college professors toward Christian adjunct faculty and towards students.

 

I couldn't get a job. I was extremely poor, living on nothing, unable to go to a doctor. I contemplated suicide. I made a retreat to a monastery to pray for guidance. And that is the plot of God through Binoculars.

 

Anti-Catholicism has a vigorous and deadly history in the US and in its mother country, the UK. The anti-Catholicism I encounter in the Ivory Tower is the anti-Catholicism of right-thinking liberals like yourself, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. The folks who want to liberate humanity in the Enlightenment sense of strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest.

 

Strangulation may not be on your "To Do List" but you do advance the worldview that makes it difficult for folks like me to get jobs. See your last two missives. We Catholics are stupid liars who commit atrocities. When I was diagnosed with cancer and my adjunct position provided no health insurance and hospitals turned me away, strangulation would have been redundant. The cancer came close enough to finishing me off.

 

How this all relates to Nazism. My dissertation, and now prize-winning book, Bieganski, talks about how right-thinking liberals use shopworn, bigoted views – like those you expressed in your last two letters – of people of faith in general, Catholics in particular, and Polish Catholic peasants, specifically, to distort Holocaust history.

 

This affected me directly, as I describe in God through Binoculars. For example, Fordham University Press, a prestigious publisher, was considering publishing my book. That would have been a boost to my career. The editor said to me, "We need a Jew to endorse the book."

 

"A Jewish scholar does endorse the book. Antony Polonsky." Polonsky is one of the most important scholars in the world in this field.

 

"He's no good. His last name sounds Polish. We need a more overtly, visibly Jewish scholar."

 

On another occasion, I encountered a big-name scholar in a public forum. He had previously never heard of me. I tried to give him a brief intro. After I said a few words, he swiftly denounced me as a typical right-wing, obscurantist, pre-Vatican II Catholic chauvinist. I'm a feminist, I've published gay-ally material, I think women should be allowed to be priests, I think abortion should be legal; I am in no sense any thing that this man accused me of being. But he knew he could defame me because of one word: "Catholic."

 

The myth that the Catholic Church was Nazi, or that Nazism was Catholic, is used to defame any and all Catholics. If we introduce facts into the conversation, we are reduced to non-person status.

 

So, yeah, you missed a lot if you missed the centrality of Catholic identity re: Nazism to the plot of "God through Binoculars."

 

Daniel, you say that child sex abuse in corporate bodies other than the Catholic Church is "irrelevant to our discussion." 

 

I'm currently watching a superb, four-part, HBO documentary series entitled "Allen v Farrow." It's about Woody Allen and his twelve-year professional and personal relationship with Mia Farrow. Their relationship ended in 1992 after Farrow discovered that Allen was f---ing her teenage daughter, Soon Yi Previn. Later that year, seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, Woody and Mia's daughter, alleged that her father sexually assaulted her. She is now thirty-five and her accusation stands.

 

Team Woody is insisting, as they have been doing for the past twenty-nine years, that Woody Allen is an artistic genius who makes brilliant films that are a gift to humanity and that Mia Farrow and her daughter Dylan are nutty and slutty and have accomplished nothing of note.

 

Diane Keaton leads that DARVO parade. "Deny Attack Reverse Victim Offender."

 

I watched Keaton's 2014 speech at the Golden Globes where Allen won the Cecil B. DeMille award. It's clear in her speech that Keaton's goal is to call Dylan Farrow a liar. Watching Keaton's speech, I feel intense rage. Rage at her callous indifference to an abused little girl. Rage that a soulless careerist like Keaton is canonized as something like America's sweetheart while Dylan Farrow is dragged through the mud.

 

Others say that the documentary should never have been made because the topic of father-daughter incest is "unseemly" and "tawdry" and "too intimate" and "unfit." Sweep child abuse and incest and the sexual exploitation of a minor under the rug. Move along, people. Nothing to see here.

 

Other than in Twitter responses to Dylan Farrow's heartfelt tweet about her decision to make public the video of her telling her mother that her father touched her private parts, in the avalanche of verbiage I've been obsessively poring over, every day, for hours a day, ever since the first episode aired, I have seen no one, no one in the New York Times or the Post or Vanity Fair or Slate or any other source, focus on ABUSED CHILDREN. ABUSED GIRLS.

 

A girl sexually assaulted by her own father, and her recovery and attempt to live a full life in spite of that: No one is focused on that. No. We're focused on titillation, the question of whether or not we should watch "Annie Hall," whether Allen's movies have gone downhill in recent years.

 

People don't care about abused kids. That's why abuse happens. Nobody cares.

 

I've known Polish-American poet, John Guzlowski, through the internet, for decades. In his kind reviews of my work, and in my reviews of his work, we've been allies in attempts to get the Polish story in front of the eyes of American readers, and I valued our ally-ship highly. The other day he unfriended me on Facebook. We'll probably never speak again.

 

I had linked to a review of "The Ratline," a new book about the Nazi Otto Wachter, who tried to escape Europe through the ratlines, that is an informal network of escape routes. John posted on my Facebook page that "The Vatican ran the ratlines because the Catholic Church is anti-Semitic."

 

I said that the historical truth is more complicated. An Austrian bishop, Alois Hudal, helped Nazis through the ratlines. Other Catholics exposed and demoted Hudal. Historians are currently attempting to discover how much the pope knew about the ratlines. See here for example.

 

Those who did help Nazis escape had reasons other than anti-Semitism. The United States formally helped many Nazis through a program called Operation Paperclip. The US used some of these Nazis in its space program. Think about that the next time you get goose pimples by the images and sounds coming from Mars. Others helped the Nazis because they believed that Nazis could contribute to the Cold War against Communism.

 

John frequently mentioned the church sex abuse crisis on his Facebook page. I understood his posts to be expressions of anti-Catholicism, rather than concern for abused kids. John had known me since the early 1990s. He knew I am a survivor of child sex abuse. He never said a single compassionate thing to me about that abuse.

 

Daniel, you cordon off discussion of sex abuse anywhere except in the Catholic Church. There is no logic behind such cordoning. There is no Catholic teaching that children are fair game for priests. Those priests who committed crimes violated Catholic teaching. Catholics are more outraged about this abuse than you are and Catholics have been working hard on this issue.

 

The work of Catholics to stop child abuse is not mirrored by any other group. Atheists have certainly not done comparable work to stop misogyny in their midst. A prominent Atheist accused of rape currently holds a prestigious university position, where he works with young people. Hollywood stars are eager to work with Woody Allen. And, again, India, Thailand, and Cambodia welcome sex tourists, many of whom prey on children, by the planeload and no one says anything.

 

What I hear from you is – and no, you don't say this directly but this is what I hear – "I don't care about sexually abused kids. I just want to exploit children's pain to bash an institution I acknowledge hating."

 

I feel rage and disgust. I don't feel you as an ally any more than, in the almost thirty years that we knew each other, I felt John to be an ally when it comes to my own victimization. To you, my pain is merely worthy of note insofar as it can advance an anti-Catholic agenda. Rhetoric like yours and John's and many others doesn't make me feel less attached to the Church. It makes me feel more attached to the Church. I refuse to be your tool to be used in a campaign of hate directed not just at the pope but at me, as well.

 

Please don't tell me that I require Geoffrey Robertson or anybody else to lecture me as to what "despicable" is when it comes to child abuse.

 

Daniel, you wrote "Christianity … spent the better part of the last two millennia torturing, raping, and murdering those who refused it."

 

This is insane, and typical Christophobic propaganda.

 

Torture?

 

Have you ever met, in person, an Atheist who was subjected to torture by Christians?

 

I have met a Catholic who was subjected to torture by Atheists. Atheists all but destroyed this martyred Catholic priest, body and mind. I met him behind the Iron Curtain.

 

You're confused about who is torturing and mass murdering for beliefs. Atheists have left the biggest pile of corpses in history. I went through the unpleasant prospect of being looked down on in the Ivory Tower. At least I was not stood up against a wall and shot in Poland or Germany or Russia or China or North Korea. At least I am not a Uighur in China.

 

Daniel, you wrote "The reason most Christians reject the horrors contained in the Bible is because they get their morality elsewhere- from secular, humanistic culture. They apply it to the Bible and so accept the fluffy bits while ignoring the primitive bits."

 

You believe all the standard Atheist BS about persons of faith. You have contempt for us, and nothing anyone says to you will sway you. Enjoy! I have no interest in trying to change your mind, or in engaging further with someone who has so much contempt for me.

You can read the entire exchange here

Church Sex Abuse Crisis and An Alleged Rape by a Birder

 

Source

Dear Daniel,

A woman named Aisha White alleged in a lengthy, detailed blog post that a prominent birder, Jason Ward, raped her.

 

White's blog post, if accurate, describes how something she had come to love, and regard as salvific, is now associated, in her mind and indeed her body, with one of the worst experiences of her life.

 

She was depressed by the COVID shutdown. She wanted more contact with nature. An African American woman, she made contact with Ward, an African American man. She was on a birding trip with him, in the woods, when the alleged assault occurred.

 

White wrote about the aftermath. "The week following the assault, I walked around in so much pain I’d have to shift my weight in creative ways to avoid the discomfort that came with simply sitting down. I was angry about what he did but I was also sad because it meant the end of a beautiful amount of time connecting with nature in a manner I had never done before …

 

The kind gesture of a man holding the door open for me now makes me nervous, as I’ve become hyper-aware of men standing behind me. I have trouble sleeping uninterrupted every single night and I sometimes experience nightmares…

 

To borrow a quote from a blog he wrote, 'One black person’s paradise can be another one’s terror.' He proved that to be true…

 

It should have been a safe space because nature does not belong to any one of us, yet it should be accessible to all of us in its many forms. He welcomed me into this beautiful world of birding but quickly stripped me of the enjoyment of it by altering my association with birds and the outdoors…

 

Although it takes deliberate – and sometimes failed – efforts from me to avoid associating birds with him or what he did, I keep trying every day. There have been many days where I felt like giving up. I felt like my voice would never be truly heard. I am trying to remember who I was before this happened – the freedom I felt, and the comfort of knowing the sound of birds signal that I am alive."

 

White's words bring me to tears. I love nature. As a rape survivor myself, I completely understand the somatic connection between surrounding circumstances and an event like rape. For me, the trigger is not birdsong, but the smell of alcohol on someone's breath.

 

Another disturbing news story is breaking. The Lincoln Project played a key role in defeating Donald Trump. I have donated to the Lincoln Project. Now it's come out that John Weaver, a co-founder, is an alleged serial sex harasser. According to accusations, though Weaver is a married man, he used his political power to attempt to coerce males as young as 14 to trade sexual contact for political access. At the same time, the Lincoln Project is accused of maintaining a sexist, homophobic, and financially corrupt workplace.

 

We were eating a delicious apple and we found a worm in it. What do we do?

 

The solution will discover and expose common denominators and shared cures. What links White's alleged assault with the alleged assaults on young men committed by Weaver with priests' assaults on children with child sex trafficking? What lies are all these rapists telling themselves? What power fuels their violations? What new narrative will decrease violations? What balm will heal all victims?

 

The Catholic Church sex abuse crisis? Get the information out there. All of it. Change the church so it never happens again.

 

But that is not enough. Please don't talk to me about sex abuse in the Catholic Church unless you want to talk to me about sex abuse, period. Please don't talk to me about Catholic children unless you also want to talk to me about Nepali or Cambodian or Thai children who are sexually trafficked throughout Asia by marketers who operate with impunity with what sellers and buyers believe is the sanction of their belief systems.

 

Don't talk to me about rape, and the association of rape with something you'd previously thought of as safe, as holy, as sacred, unless you want to talk to me about events like what allegedly happened to Aisha White or the teen boys harassed by John Weaver. Or the Atheist women raped by New Atheist celebrities, celebrities empowered by misogynist New Atheist culture.

 

Because selective outrage – I only want to talk about sex abuse in the Catholic Church but nowhere else – communicates to me that the speaker is NOT a compassionate savior who wants to right wrongs, but is, in fact, a stone-cold hater, whose goal is not helping victims but smearing Catholicism, who exploits victims' pain to that end.

 

This will be my last letter, I think, on the church sex abuse crisis.

 

I want to make a request of you. If you want to refer to something I said, please quote me. Please don't paraphrase. I ask this because in a couple of previous pieces, you paraphrase me as saying something I don't think and never said. As a survivor of child sex abuse myself, I'm sensitive about what words others put in my mouth on this topic.

 

We need to move on to talking about Darwin and evolution, so I'll go silent on church sex abuse after this, at least for the time being, and give you a chance to respond to my letters on the sex abuse crisis.

And then we can move on to Darwin and evolution. 

The Church Sex Abuse Crisis, Dialogue with an Atheist, Continued.

 

Dear Daniel,

 

On Thanksgiving, 2020, I posted a sixty-seven-year-old photo of my older brother Joe's graduation from kindergarten to first grade. Though I posted the photo on a holiday, the photo received a large number of likes, comments, and shares. It wasn't my brother, handsome tyke though he was, who generated such love. It was the woman with the slightly tilted head in the very back row, a woman I had never met, and whose name I did not know.

 

I remember seeing this woman in church. I remember the slight but permanent tilt of her head. I assumed it was a medical problem of some kind, but I somehow knew that this anatomical anomaly did not mark her as less; I somehow knew it was a minor martyrdom she carried with grace. Of the hundreds of people who, when I was a child, I watched walk up that aisle to receive communion, she stood out. There was something beatific about this woman I never met, never stood next to, and never heard speak.

 

Because I posted this photo on Facebook, I now know who she is. She's standing in back of my brother's kindergarten class of fifty-two students. There are no teacher aides standing with her; she's solely responsible for those kids. The following comments are cut and pasted from Facebook.

 

"Miss Gilpatrick was the best."

 

"She surely was!"

 

"What a great lady."

 

"My favorite teacher EVER."

 

"I learned to read with Miss Gilpatrick. She made a classroom in her garage to give kids extra help."

 

"When we were seniors I was a cashier in the Haskell A&P grocery store. One day Miss Gilpatrick came to my checkout. I felt like royalty was in my line. I didn't have to tell her who I was. She said, 'Little Marilyn Evans of course I remember you.' I bet she remembered many students. The very best teacher!!"

 

"Naomi Gilpatrick was a wonderful teacher! Who else could teach more than 50 kindergarten children without an aide or two? She did science experiments, and taught us to read and write. She even had a pageant, at year's end, where our class sang and recited the Gettysburg Address. In her later years, she would cut the flowers she grew in her garden, put each one in a vase, and deliver them to nursing home residents. She was really an incredible woman!"

 

"Mrs. Gilpatrick kept everyone straight. Guess I was in kindergarten in 1958 with her. In the early 70s my security clearance was being raised and the security services talked to Mrs. Gilpatrick. I told them she has had hundreds of students since I was there. I was called into a major's office. He had done her interview and told me she not only could name EVERY student she ever had, she had our pictures also. He grinned and said I would get my clearance anyway. Not sure if he was busting my chops or what! She was a GREAT Lady and I'm sure heaven is now in line."

 

A Google search brought me to an obituary.

 

"GILPATRICK Dr. Naomi, 92 … Born to the late Honora (Sheehan) and Amisa Gilpatrick … Irish American, author, and professor, Naomi graduated Salutatorian from Pompton Lakes HS in 1935 and Summa Cum Laude from St. Elizabeth's College in 1939. She received her Master's Degree at the University of Michigan (Honors in English; Phi Beta Kappa) and her Doctorate in Education from Columbia University … She won the Avery Hopwood Award for Major Fiction with her novel, The Broken Pitcher (1943). This book was reviewed as 'The great Catholic American novel.' Naomi will be remembered for her deep dedication to family and friends, her skillful pen, her clever mind, her Irish wit and sense of humor, her love of children and her dedication to her Catholic faith."

 

Mexican American author Richard Rodriguez wrote, "I cannot overstate the influence of the Irish on my life and the lives of my family … All the nuns who taught me English and then introduced me to the idea that I was an American … were Irish – and the priests, too. The nuns made me learn the preamble to the Constitution. The nuns taught me confidence. There was no question about my belonging in America … There was no question about English being my language. The nuns were as unsentimental as the priests were sentimental. But they all assumed my American success."

 

My beloved friend Liron writes from Israel. "My mother-in-law's name is Theresa Rosendahl (nee Friedrich). She was born Yoheved, but the nuns gave her a new name: Theresa. She kept this Catholic name in gratitude to that towering heroine who saved her life." This heroine was Teresa Janina Kierocińska, one of many Polish nuns who hid Jewish children during the Holocaust.

 

I want the Church sex abuse story to be told in a way that inspires change. That has happened.

 

I want this story told, too. A story of thousands of not-famous, not-glamorous priests, nuns, and Catholic school teachers who shared the best, the truth, the heart of Catholicism with their students.

 

Higher-ups in the church hid the abuse. That's criminal and destructive.

 

It is no less criminal and destructive to hide the world that Mrs. Gilpatrick and others created for millions of children. They weren't just "nice" people who did "nice" things. They were Catholics, obedient to Christ's commands and a Catholic tradition of learning and love. Yes, we know about failures and errors. We also need to know about Catholicism's unique gifts.