Recently, the elderly owner of an NBA basketball team made a racial remark and was forced to give up his team. A well-known TV chef admitted to using the "N" word thirty years ago and her show was cancelled. An NFL football player made what was judged to be an intolerant comment about the first openly gay NFL draftee and was sent to sensitivity training. But make the most hideous remarks and jokes about nuns, priests, or Catholicism in general, and you move to the front of the class.

Fr. James Martin has called anti-Catholicism in America "The last acceptable prejudice." Why is this? Some of it is our own doing. We have been too tolerant of our internal Judases. But I would say that what Archbishop Fulton Sheen said nearly half a century ago is still true: “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”

But why is the Catholic Church still so "wrongly perceived" that it has now become the "last acceptable prejudice?" I would contend that it is because regular "cradle Catholics" like me have failed to "give a reason for our faith" (1 Pet 3:15). Well, here's mine.