Twenty years ago, a well educated friend told me straight-faced “the Catholic Church is responsible for all the problems in the world.” I’m still trying to figure out what exactly he meant.
Your “well-educated” friend is a perfect example of the famous quotation by Bishop Fulton Sheen,
“There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church.”
My godson, before he became a Catholic, bought and read a copy of John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshhold of Hope. He left it on a coffee table one day as a professor he knew came by for dinner. The professor saw the book and said, “Mike, I’m surprised you’re reading that book. I think John Paul II is the most evil man of the 20th century.” My godson told me his mind went reeling: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. . . No, the worst man who lived in the last century was the pope.
Some men are so intensely bigoted that their prejudice actually makes them stupid.