Your Opinions: Parishioners must lead in changing Catholic Church

Re “Pope apologizes for ‘crimes’ by church” (Aug.27): A group of us practicing Catholics have met to talk about the scandal in the church. What we want to see is a sweep across the entire hierarchy to rid us of these criminals, even at the risk of not having enough priests to celebrate mass.

It’s okay if we’re left without priests until the mess is cleaned up; we can meet without benefit of clergy. Better to be without clergy than to bury our heads in the sand; otherwise, we the faithful are just as complicit in perpetrating this heinous abomination.

Angela Campanella

Clairemont

Calling on churches to help campaign is wrong

Re “Trump calls on pastors to help GOP win in Nov.” Aug 29): Donald Trump is dangling the Johnson Amendment-carrot in front of evangelical ministers Two people we should never trust: a religious leader who tells us how to vote and a politician who tells us how to pray.

Serena Contreras

San Diego

Continued church revelations concerning

Re “Pope: ‘No effort must be spared’ to fight abuses” (Aug. 21): Outrage and reaction against the seemingly endless revelations of the sexual abuse of young people by Catholic priests is warranted, but does it address the causes of the problem, which many believe to be rooted in church dogma and regulation?

Weeding out criminal priests, identifying them postmortem, apologizing to victims and families are proper responses, but they are not solutions. One solution may be, with the stroke of a pen, abolishing the bizarre and unnatural thousand-year-old insistence on the celibacy of priests. There is nothing in church dogma requiring that priests be unmarried, but celibacy became a rule during the Second Lateran Council in 1139.

Why has it persisted all these years? Are the clergy of all other religions who allow normal relations between men and women somehow tainted and unable to perform their sacred duties? The pope can rule on this historic error.

Dennis Greene

Bankers Hill

We drift away from religion at our peril

I was shocked to read that 49.5 percent of freshmen consider themselves to be none, atheist or agnostic in religious affiliation in the 2017 survey at UC San Diego. In his 1999 book, “America’s Real War,” Rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote extensively about how secularists were taking over many aspects of American Life, especially education.

Christian religious leaders have had their heads in the sand over the past 60 years regarding the shocking shrinking of the number of Americans who consider themselves Christian. We have seen very little public push-back by them in terms of the secularist’s attempts to take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance, take “God” out of our coinage, take God and the Ten Commandments out of our Public places.

Paul Sims

Solana Beach

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