Reply #1: I had one just like her, a staunch Irish Catholic

[Warpy]

who professed to be an agnostic who firmly believed in reincarnation. My dad bought the whole party line.

My mother, to her credit, turned down last rites saying she didn't want to die that big a hypocrite. My dad, three years later, told me on his deathbed that he didn't believe any of that Sunday school crap any more. I had nothing to do with it, my irreligious nature being one sore point between us for years that we never discussed.

They both, however, identified as Catholics to the very end. It was like identifying as Europeans, as having blue eyes, as being Americans, one of the conditions of life they were born with.

Although I kicked the church to the curb when I was 10, I am still interested in what's going on with it and I still love Catholics for their sense of fun, their sense of fairness, and their good sense to thumb their noses at rules that simply make no sense, like the reproductive rules laid down by celibate old men in dresses.

Most are like your mother, with a good sense of where the church really is and that's not the Vatican. I just hope this set of scandals borne by an intensely unpopular pope will be the hierarchy's undoing.

The church should survive. Rome should not.