This is in response to a story in the Sun Journal, published May 30.

As a Catholic, I have grappled my entire life with Catholicism’s bigoted pomposity. Although Jesus chose married men and women as disciples, antiquated, imperious Catholic potentates, waving banners of traditionalism and egocentric infallibility, perpetuate censuring women from the priesthood or as marriageable partners for celibate priests. Consequently, scandalous comportment within church hierarchy reveals an integral, illusory component to the irrational, dogmatic nonsense.

Women never betrayed Jesus to the Pharisees, nor disappointed him in Gethsemane. They never renounced our lord thrice, nor abandoned him on Golgotha. As initial eyewitness to his resurrection, Jesus chose Mary Magdalen over male counterparts. The feast of Assumption commemorates our heavenly mother’s ultimate glorification. Males can offer no equitable parallel.

Nonetheless, despite proving themselves worthy before God, the church obscenely upholds its prejudicial denigration of women.

No longer passively slumbering, societies are less gullible, more skeptical of mystical domineering agendas and more apt to challenge the true motives of particular doctrines. Unquestionably, the Catholic church confronts a crisis as priests and congregations diminish at alarming rates.

Lenny Bruce, an American stand-up comic and satirist, offered a brilliant assessment of the phenomenon when he observed, “Every day, people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”

Unless medieval, ecclesiastical delusionists embrace reasoned ministries over fanatical, traditionalist posturing, they will seal their fortunes as fossilized relics of human history.

Roger R. Turcotte, Lewiston