Letter to the Editor

The reviewer says it's a shame that an editor didn't blue pencil what he or she perceives as the book's anti-Catholicism. In fact, this book had an excellent editor who did not take this action, because as he says, he learned about the many violent and intolerant excesses of that church in high school, as I did, in part, and as many others have by consulting the hundreds of books published on the subject over the last 100 years. Karen Armstrong, in her recent and popular "A History of God," says much the same thing.

What is involved here is not a personal prejudice fostered by inappropriate teachings on the part of the nuns concerned, but well documented history, of which the reviewer is apparently ignorant.

If the reviewer had read the book more closely, he or she might have noted that the entire purpose of reiterating that history is to make the point that the natural center of any Christian religion is the teachings of Jesus, and not intolerant exclusive doctrines that justify the torture and murder of those of other faiths or those Christians who dissent from those doctrines.

He or she might also have noted that I also state that since the pronouncements of the Holy Office of the Catholic Church in 1952 disavowed the concept of exclusivity, it has a more advanced view of religious tolerance than Protestant denominations.

--William Fix, author of "Lake of Memory Rising"