I usually don’t have time to read the papers, but I’m laid up with a bad knee from when I tripped over my Knights of Columbus sword and fell into my grotto of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Those scapulars are really pointy.

I’ve been sitting around reading The Providence Journal. It’s bad for my blood pressure. I almost choked on my Ovaltine when I saw M.Charles Bakst’s column about Bishop Tobin’s ‘attack’ on gay marriage.

Bakst seems to take Bishop Tobin seriously, which tells me that the Bishop’s strategy is working. You see, Bishop Tobin is not a traditionalist, he’s a ‘go along to get along’ kind of guy. He knows that it’s politically correct to bash gays. Everyone is doing it–well everyone who matters, anyway. Crusading against gay marriage is a great way for the Bishop to act like he’s doing something.

Meanwhile, Bishop Tobin is silent about the real scourge of our age–DIVORCE!

How can the Catholic Church stand against rampant divorce when the state condones it? How can they explain to people that they are fornicators and adulterers in the eyes of God when the state gives them a marriage license? How can the Church teach children that they are the bastard spawn of an invalid relationship when everyone treats their family as if they were normal and respectable.

It’s gotten so bad that even Catholics who failed to get an annulment show up at Mass. Next they’ll be asking to take Communion.

When is Bishop Tobin going to out these people? His problem is that he is too Americanized. He should spend more time in Rome, or in Dublin, and then he can see how the Church uses its clout with the state. Divorce was illegal in Italy and Ireland until recently, and unhappy couples still have to jump through so many hoops that they are caught in legal limbo for years. But it’s better than centuries in Purgatory.

I hope that Bishop Tobin will abandon his distracting and ineffectual attack on gay marriage and take on the real fight. It’s time for him to stand up at the altar and name the adulterers. We all know who they are, let’s hear it from the Bishop.