A reader writes:

As a child, I spent many days in the "public" rooms of a Catholic rectory, where the priest had been a second father to my father. My father's parents had died in the flu epidemic in Boston in 1917, and my father was raised by a spinster sister/brother combination, always under the supervision of Fr. (later Msgr.) Doolan. Monsignor Doolan was a second father to him. (I've changed his name to ensure anonymity).

One summer, I must have been eight or nine years old, a new curate, let's call him Father Callaghan, said he would take me to a Red Sox game to get me out of the gloomy rooms. I was thrilled! Fr. Callaghan was funny and friendly and full of vitality: not at all like a priest, I thought.

I ran to my parents to tell them of this magical intervention. I'll never forget old Msgr. Doolan, with his cigar-stained lips and dyspeptic expression, rising from his chair and shouting, "No!"

No? Why, "No!?"