Cue the Protestant applause for Catholic Bishops? Not so fast. Not in progressive Protestant circles, anyway.

In our corner of the religious world, writers have argued that living with a certain amount of compromise is really just the way America rolls—that such a big, influential, well established institution can hardly say it's being persecuted, and that if you really want to know what the position of the Catholic Church on contraception is you should poll the American Catholic laity, not its bishops. Some have even privately suggested that the American bishops are trying to divert attention away from the pedophilia charges lodged against them.