Free Republic

“Wolf Hall,” the Man Booker Prize-winning historical novel about the court of Henry VIII — and most dramatically, the conflict between Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More — is now a TV series (presented on PBS). It is maddeningly good. Maddening because its history is tendentiously distorted, yet the drama is so brilliantly conceived and executed that you almost don’t care. Faced with an imaginative creation of such brooding, gripping, mordant intensity, you find yourself ready to pay for it in historical inaccuracy. And “Wolf Hall’s” revisionism is breathtaking. It inverts the conventional view of the saintly More being undone...

The sexual abuse of children is not a "Catholic problem." It is a societal problem. In point of fact, there has been far less less abuse within the Church than there has been across the rest of society. See here. Your children are much safer in the Church than they are in the public schools. But you would never know this to listen to Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author who was raised Roman Catholic and educated at a convent school. According to the now enlightened Ms. Mantel, the Catholic Church "is not an institution for respectable people" because the...