Curing felonious priests

Your coverage of the bishops' conference (NCR, June 27) arrived as I was deep into a recently published book titled Darwin Day in America by John G. West. West is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. The rest sentence on the book's jacket reads: "At the dawn of the last century, leading scientists and politicians predicted that science, especially Darwinian biology, would supply solutions to all the intractable problems of American society, from crime to poverty, to sexual maladjustment." In the chapter "Criminal Science," the author pinpoints the effects that scientific materialism had on our fundamental concepts of moral culpability for criminal actions: The concept of free will is denied by this philosophy and punishment is to be replaced with a "cure."

It strikes me as the ultimate irony that the bishops, "men of God," could have so easily bought into the atheistically inspired psychobabble idea of "curing" the felonious priests under their direction. They didn't only abandon their moral responsibility to the victims; they abandoned God in the process.

ERNEST RATTERMAN

Powell, Ohio

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