P.R., vatican-style.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Public relations by the Catholic Church related to child sexual abuse scandals

Dear Holy Father, I cannot tell you how thrilled we at Fibber, Spinmeister, and Mendassiti are to have your most exalted business. As you know, we are a world-class (though hardly worldly!) public relations firm whose past clients include Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, and Elliott Abrams. But this is our first opportunity to represent the Deity Himself, at least in a case involving multiple and serial sexual molestations.

Not to cast aspersions on your P.R. efforts to date, but we have the distinct sense they may have been generated by some local Vatican City outfit with only limited experience outside the realm of multimillion-dollar Vatican financial scandals. You may not realize it, but Americans take pederasty far more seriously than mere illegal profiteering, as shown by the fact that the Enron perpetrators remain at large while certain individuals rumored to have conducted satanic rituals with their day care charges continue to languish in prison.

The fallout from the present scandal could be disastrous, with our pollsters finding that seven out of ten baptized Catholics now believe that your ban on birth control exists solely to keep up the supply of molestable children.

Perhaps even more alarming from your point of view, a full nine out of ten habitual mass-goers now attribute the Church's ban on female priests as a means of maintaining that heady "locker-room" atmosphere in the changing area behind the altar. Those who have not yet embraced the heresy of a mixed-gender priesthood nevertheless favor the hiring of female matrons to oversee the altar boys as they get their gowns on.

Space does not permit me to list all the ER. blunders that have been made so far, but I would mention that it seems to us a serious mistake to blame the epidemic of priestly molestation on the "gaying" of the Church. The focus groups we have conducted report that the complex, ever-shifting relationships they observe on Queer as Folk are not only same-sex but same-age, same haircut, same physique, and same so many other things that it is impossible to tell the characters apart.

No, the priestly predilection for little boys seems to reflect their sheer availability. If parishes ministered to German shepherds or sheep--taking them on overnight trips, for example, and enlisting them in special priest-led discussion groups--we are sure the scandal would have taken on a rather different coloration.

Secondly, while we appreciate the ingenuity...