"The child molester was also a brilliant, generous, talented man — the only person who ever read me a bedtime story."

"I will love him forever, for that, even when I wake up gasping and afraid."

A startling passage — in an essay by Elizabeth Scalia — AKA The Anchoress — that tries to explain — on this Good Friday — how she can be a Catholic after so many revelations about priests who sexually abuse children and the kindly protection they have received within the power structure of the Church.

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It occurs to me that these priests — and Scalia's family pedophile — are the opposite of Boo Radley. Boo Radley — a character in "To Kill a Mockingbird" — was the reclusive neighbor who, failing to make a conventional show of friendliness, scared the children. But when the children are endangered, he saves them.

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A Tom Toles cartoon: