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I was aware that my intended's father was a regular attendee of an Episcopal Church in Palo Alto and that there was a well-known pioneer bishop in the family's ancestry. I did not, however, realize what a blow it was to Sam not to have his youngest daughter married in the church of his faith. I never heard it from either my wife or her parents. It was my brother-in-law Jack who first mentioned having reassured my new in-laws that I would not insist on myriad children or that my wife should change her religious beliefs. Later I heard that my wife's aunt, a hard-drinking divorcee who wrote The Bishop's Newsletter for the Anglicans of Louisville, referred to me as "a goddamned R.C." Once she and I finally met, we got along swimmingly-perhaps because I would join her in her pre-lunch martinis.

Like the crucifix in my suitcase at Yale, my insistence on a Catholic church wedding was largely to pacify my mother. She would have been devastated had her son "left the church" to marry, and even without her influence I would have felt uncomfortable being married in another church. In recent years I have teased my wife that our marriage is probably neither valid nor licit since the priest who performed the ceremony has since been defrocked (as was his brother, a Marin County priest) for having been secretly married at the time he performed our sacrament. Whoops! I'm showing my age. I understand that these days priests are laicized, not defrocked, even though the new term causes my spell checker to see red.

Organized religion does not loom large in my life. I still call myself a Catholic but don't attend Mass. I remember having my mother come for a Palo Alto visit that extended into a Sunday. In attempting to accompany her to Mass at St. Ann's Chapel, where I had been married, I got a little lost and we were nearly late. It had been a long time since I had been there, and I had become a bit vague about the chapel's location.

Neither of my sons has espoused any religion, and I sent them to public schools. Both have been baptized but neither one in the Catholic Church. The elder was christened at the Dutch Reformed Church in Istanbul where I was teaching; the younger in a Palo Alto Episcopal church.

I'm not sure just how I feel about the recent wave of pedophilia accusations about Catholic priests. I think it has become something of a witch-hunt that the media delights in, and that not a few people are coming up with accusations that are bogus. It's clear and reasonable that

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