For several months, I have been attending yoga classes. As a tall man who has been crammed into ill-fitting chairs and desks all my life, I find these classes difficult. My body is stiff. I can be frustrated because of my inability to do poses others do so readily.

Miami Bishop Thomas Wenski was achingly correct when he stated in a recent homily that the storm pounding the Church is not a crisis of faith, but one of leadership.

I officially jumped on the audiobook bandwagon about a year ago. 

Frustrated by the Church’s inability to defuse long-running clergy sex scandals, Pope Francis has summoned the worldwide presidents of Catholic bishops conferences to the Vatican in February to find better ways to protect children and eradicate predatory priests.

Make reparations

There is a time for mercy and a time for turning over the tables of money exchangers. The time for mercy is over! Now is the time to turn over those proverbial tables.

Our shepherds must stop asking for forgiveness and engage in profound reparation (for sexual abuse victims) in the hope of meriting forgiveness. Only then can the abandoned and abused sheep begin to trust the shepherds.  

And, no, the money must not come from the donations of the faithful but rather from the personal pockets of each predator and enabler, including the pockets of those who kept the secrets.

Dona Tiberio-Smith,

Maple, Ont.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was long, emotional and painful, but necessary as an act of a nation’s contrition after facilitating decades of abuse at residential schools. 

Before I became a Catholic 10 years ago I viewed the papacy as a monarchy, representing great strength and self-assurance. 

In a remote fishing village, the people became accustomed to the pounding of the heavy seas which imperiled every boat leaving their harbour, but they never could become accustomed to the deaths. The deaths of fishermen caught in the grip of an uncompromising ocean in the dead of night. 

In the current state of distress highlighted by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s claim that Pope Francis has long known about accusations of sexual abuse against former American cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the story of the previous pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, should be recalled.

I am looking forward to my next visit to Holy Family Church on King Street West in Toronto. It was my home for two years in the 1990s when I was a student at St. Philip’s Seminary, which is attached to the parish.