During the Pope's visit to America, I had the privilege of commenting for NBC News and for MSNBC. Twice I was on for extended periods with Brian Williams and twice with Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball.
A theme to which Chris Matthews returned again and again was the role of women in the Church. Like most liberally minded Catholics, he thinks that women get the short end of the stick most of the time and that simple justice demands that they be given equal opportunity. Once he baldly introduced the subject to me this way: "Bishop, isn't it true that, in the Catholic Church, the management is all male while the women do most of the grunt work? Why can't women be priests?"
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