Letters

As a psychologist who has dealt with ministers of many faiths who have molested children and adolescents, I take grave issue with an allegation made by A.W. Richard Sipe’s wife, Marianne Benkert (“A Voice Suddenly Heard,” by Tony Perry, July 7): “There’s a difference between spirituality and the church as a bureaucracy. That’s what we want people to separate. The church bureaucracy is in trouble, but spirituality remains strong.”

To many of us in the helping professions, this kind of reasoning--”I am not responsible; it is my hand that did it, my body, my emotions, my instincts or my past that is responsible” -- is redolent. It is called rationalization, self-deception or mauvaise foi (bad faith). Spiritual persons are spiritual exactly to the degree that they act congruently with that spirituality. There can be no “ethics” or “spirituality” in the heart of the SS storm trooper who shoots an innocent and nudges him into the grave, but who does so neatly and then crosses himself.

William V. Ofman

Los Angeles