Attacks on Cote unjustified

I'd first like to remind the Catholics at Duke that this is America, and not Vatican City.

It is with this in mind that I defend Boston Cote's most recent column ("The road to Hell," March 3). Both of her published detractors claim Cote's column unfairly attacks or portrays the Catholic Church in a negative light. They both insinuate that the piece is something offensive, not an admittedly courageous public disclosure of her own troubling experiences with organized religion.

If either of the deeply offended Catholics who wrote letters actually read her column carefully, they would have discovered that she wants to be Catholic.

The fact that its rituals "stopped resonating with [her] long ago" is not her fault. It is the fault of the Church for not only failing in its attempts to include her in its flock (isn't that its mission?), but in pushing her away by calling her honest experiences nothing more than "acidic" or "cruel and intolerant." The really intolerant group here is the pious bunch of Catholics who would rather quash religious debate than have an open discussion about what really makes sense in religion.

Here in America, one's religious choices are one's own. Nobody would attack a truly believing Catholic for his or her opinions. Yet Cote writes a column expressing her anguish at not feeling truly "complacent" within her desired religion, and she is crucified by the self-righteous Catholic community (pun definitely intended).

I have no doubt that there are, in fact, "welcoming, accepting and genuinely caring" Catholics in the world and here at Duke. But at the same time, there are undeniably those who regard religious dissension as "destructive" or a "dismissal." People like these burned so-called "heretics" in the Middle Ages, and I have no doubt they would do the same to Cote if given the chance today.

Andrew Shadoff

Trinity '07