The issue isn't whether what Catholics believe about communion is true or false or makes sense at all. It was simply disrespectful to go for communion given what they do believe and given the church's policies or rather it would be if Quinn had a notion of what Catholics believed--which she didn't.

Her utter ignorance is what's depressing. There is now a growing population of otherwise educated people who haven't got a clue about ordinary religious belief and practice--or assume that churchgoers are some great unwashed Other with their strange superstitions and folkways.

I agree completely with the above.

First, I am a liberal Protestant and the church I grew up in welcomes everyone to Communion. I may believe that all churches should do so, but that misses the point. As a student at parochial school I frequently was required to attend Mass, and I understood that I was not welcome to participate in Catholic Communion unless I shared certain beliefs and preparatory rituals. Even as a little kid, I knew it was more appropriate to stay seated in the pew than to go up and try to make my own private meaning out of the Catholic ritual.

Second, the general lack of education about religion truly is depressing. Regardless of your spiritual belief, education about religious beliefs (Christian and otherwise) is vital to a meaningful understanding of history, literature, language and current events. It is frustrating and sad to hear someone confuse "Catholic" with "Christian" or Sikhism with Islam. It is even more frustrating, given this country's heavily Protestant history, to find so much ignorance of the substantive differences between the Christian churches.

Thanks! It's lousy politically too, because you have ignorant, religiously tone-deaf progressives who don't have a clue about how to talk to Catholics or mainline Protestants and assume that anyone who's religiously affiliated is a write-off "pro-life", anti-gay conservative evangelical. This sucks.

It's also pathetic that this ignorance locks people out of some of the major big deals of their culture: can't read the Metaphysical Poets or Paradise Lost without extensive footnotes, don't know what the Bach B Minor Mass is about, etc. The issue isn't "faith" or buying in, but just knowing the story and getting it, understanding the differences between different religious groups, recognizing that it isn't educated, politically progressive secularists vs. uneducated, conservative religious folk who need to be mollified or written off.