She'll talk about 20 or 30 different people, many of whom I know only from her description of them. Of these people, she'll zero in on one and rant for ten or fifteen minutes. Invariably the person has been divorced and remarried at least once. There may be charges of embezzlement. This was the case with the former parish priest. In fact, that is the punch-line to all these intense scrutinies: the guilty party is a Catholic who goes to church every Sunday.

And she prefaces these diatribes with, "Now I know you belong to the Catholic religion but what gets me about Catholics ..." In this case, her objection to Catholicism was the practice of confessing sin. Yes, to a priest, but then in general.

"If you know it's wrong, don't do it in the first place!"

I don't think the sacrament of penance encourages sin any more than those who lean on 1 John 1:9.

I was on the verge of reminding her of the Lord's Prayer which she probably knows:

"And forgive us our trespasses, ..."

But instead I just became keenly aware that Christianity presumes guilt and, therefore, doesn't have anything to say to people who live right.