The trouble with being a priest was that you eventually had to take the advice you gave to others.

Gerry had once said to her in the middle of an argument that he didn't believe in souls but if, just perchance, they did exist, hers would be like a razor. She had been made that way by the Catholic Church, he said. Inflexible, narrow, capable of doing terrible damage by her adherence to rules and systems. But she totally objected. She told him that if she was a good person at all, it had come from her religion. If she had any sense of justice and fairness, any concept of equality, then it had come from the Church.

The Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue…To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church. However, here’s the flip side. The Catholic Church couples its extraordinary moral demand with an extraordinarily lenient penitential system. The Church mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute. To grasp both of these extremes is to understand the Catholic approach to morality.

It's not as if the Catholic church can do whatever it wants. As Catholics, we believe that God gave us some things and left some things are for us to figure out on our own. Ultimately, it makes no apologies because it's an object of faith. It's not just another club.

It has always been the view of the Catholic Church that human beings such as asylum seekers should be treated as human beings, not as political footballs. This policy sounds as though it could be quite punitive toward asylum seekers who have left their countries of origin because of dire and dangerous situations. It is important to focus on the problem of people smuggling while not holding asylum seekers responsible for this phenomenon.

The Catholic Church wasn't just a part of his parents' live, and his grandparents', it ruled their lives. The priests told them what to eat, what to do, who to vote for, what to think. What to believe.

Told them to have more and more babies. Kept them pregnant and poor and ignorant.

They'd been beaten in school, scolded in church, abused in the back rooms.

And when, after generations of this, they'd finally walked away, the Church had accused them of being unfaithful. And threatened them with eternal damnation.

Some people think that - excuse my expression here - that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No. Parenthood is about being responsible. This is clear.

It was thus an excellent reply that the woman made when she wanted to send a boatload of provisions to the exiled Gratilla;* for when someone said to her, ‘Domitian will merely confiscate them,’ she replied, ‘Better that he should take them away than that I should fail to send them.

Catholics are taught to be inclusive instead of superior. That is why, like it or not, tolerance must be the chief characteristic of the church. I want to be friends with anyone. I won't promote inclusivism. Rather, I will visit people and sit with them for a cup of coffee. This is better than just attending formal meetings of the Interfaith Communication Forum.

It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them — it seemed really the way to live — the version that met their convenience.