WASHINGTON — First, a confession:  For years I have been avoiding the Masses in my parish,
Blessed Sacrament, celebrated by the associate pastor, the Rev. Percival D'Silva, because his homilies
— forgive me, father — are on the soporific side.

Not last Sunday's.
After a Passion Play, with kids as Roman soldiers in gold plastic helmets re-enacting Jesus' crucifixion,
the Bombay-born priest launched into a poignant and gutsy sermon that snapped even the least latte-ed
congregants to attention. In a church in Chevy Chase, the priest sent a message to the Church in Rome.
He called for the resignation of the Boston cardinal.

"His name is Law but he is not above the law," he said, according to those who were there.
"If he loves the church, it's time for him to go. He has to go."   He was upset that good priests
are being tarnished by molesters and hurt by the collusion of church leaders turning a blind eye.

"I tell you I will never hurt your children," he said, his voice trembling. "I love your children."
He mourned a screening process that had let a lot of "weirdos" and "sickos" into the priesthood.
And he urged the people in the pews to take back their Church.

At first the applause was soft. Then it swelled. Then people began rising in twos and threes.
Finally, there was a standing ovation.

His fighting words caught the attention of newspapers and even prompted a question at the
White House press briefing, where a reporter asked Ari Fleischer if the president agreed
or disagreed with Father D'Silva. (Ari hedged.)

The resonance of the sermon underscores the dilemma for American Catholics: Will they continue
to pick and choose privately among the Vatican's antiquated dictums on divorce, birth control and
homosexuality, and suppress doubts about a celibate, all-male priesthood?
Or is it finally time for a public reckoning?

Should they demand that the Vatican, which has been shrugging off the pedophilia crisis and rejecting
reforms that could alleviate it, admit its failings and step into the modern world?

The Blessed Sacrament newsletter shows how far parishioners have already traveled from the medieval
tenets of Rome. There are announcements for meetings of "Separated and Divorced Catholics" and for
"Always Our Children," a group for parents of lesbians and gays.

The comments of Vatican officials reflect the depths of their denial about how many American priests
are gay — anywhere from 30 to 50 percent by various estimates.

"People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained," the pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said recently.
Homosexuality and pedophilia are not the same thing, and the Vatican makes matters worse by seeming to
conflate the two. Moreover, child sexual abuse is not an orientation — it's a behavior and a crime.

"If a 30-year-old man abuses a 7-year-old girl, you don't hit yourself on the head and say, `That dirty heterosexual!' "
says Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and former Benedictine monk and priest who has written extensively about the
sexuality of the clergy.  "Remember, celibacy is also a culture," he says. "If all lawyers had to be male, unmarried
and practice perfect chastity, would it change the culture? Of course."

The vow of celibacy serves as a magnet for men running away from sexual feelings they are ashamed of. And the
allegedly celibate society these men enter — "A Secret World," as Mr. Sipe titled one of his books — retards
their sexual development, funneling their impulses in inappropriate directions. Vatican officials don't want to deal
with that. Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos recently complained about all the coverage of priests molesting kids,
noting the absence of studies comparing the prevalence of pedophilia in other professions.

"That ignores the unique sway priests have over children and the extra damage they can do," says my Times
colleague Frank Bruni, an author of the 1993 book "A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse and the
Catholic Church." "When a man of God abuses you, that's an awfully devastating wound."

Father D'Silva obviously gets this. Until the men above him do, the church has surrendered its state of grace.