For a practising Roman Catholic whose first twelve years of school education took place in Catholic schools, the child abuse scandals involving Roman Catholic priests have produced in me a variety of reactions, some of which have been shared on this web site.  However, never has it produced depression or immobilization.  Instead, I determined to learn more about my religion and about the organization that has embodied that religion over the last 2000 years.  As a result, I have read the following books, which I would recommend for the same purpose to Catholics and non-Catholics alike:

• A Concise Hostory of the Catholic Church, by Thomas Bokenkotter, Doubleday, 1977, 2004;
• The Battle for the American Church, by Msgr. George A. Kelly, Doubleday, 1979;
• Papal Sin, Structures of Deceit, by Garry Wills, Doubleday, 2000;
• Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, by Ross King, Penguin Books, 2003.

• My Faith is more secure than ever;
• The religion is sacred and supernatural, a super-highway through this life and to the next, the "main event";
• The organization on which Jesus Christ founded this religion is human, and as such has been capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil;
• The fact that the Church has survived and generally thrived for over 2000 years is a tribute to both that humanity and to constant Divine intervention;
• The Church survived the attacks of the Romans to become a great temporal as well as spiritual power, actually the only stable organization to get humanity through the Dark Ages of barbarian invasions and destruction;
• That experience with temporal power corrupted Church leaders and a succession of Popes (including some terrible men) to maintain that power at almost any cost right into the 20th century;
• Despite that history, Church leaders and a succession of famous Saints always sought to define, maintain and spread the "Good News of the Gospel", a task in which they were very ably assisted by a devout monk named Martin Luther who tore them violently away from some of their more egregious activities of the time;
• Throughout that history and to the present time, the human Church has placed great store on stability and conformity, often siding with reactionary forces to insure a minimum of change; this manifested itself in the Church's reaction to the Renaissance, to the revolutionary spirit of the eighteenth century, to the explosion of science and learning of the nineteenth century, and to its halting response to the "aggiornamento" of Vatican II prompted by Pope John XXIII and thwarted by his early death.
• The Church continues to have a hard time with changing times...and that is both the bad news and the good news for an institution that has survived for 2000 years and is likely to guide the world for another 2000 years.
• And so, for those of us members of the Roman Catholic Faith and also of the Roman Catholic Church, the latter is a "necessary but not sufficient" component of our lives.  Nor is it the more important component.    The Church is human; our Faith is Divine.