My thought for the day, which...

...I hope to expand on shortly, is: Have therapists taken the place in society once held by the clergy?

Think about it: If you had a problem, to whom would you turn?

One of the biggest divisions in America today is that between the secular and the religious. And, make no mistake about it, many members of mainstream churches and synagogues are actually secular; they belong for other reasons, mostly cultural.

Take the Catholic Church, for example, and the recent stir over birth control. I've read that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptives at one time or another. Ninety-eight percent! (Even my sister, who is about as Catholic as you can get, took birth control pills when she was younger.) So practically no one is listening to the Church on this issue.

I've also heard that priests have been reading letters at Mass lately from bishops condemning the president's policy on Catholic institutions and birth control. And parishioners, I'm sure, have been sitting in the pews and nodding their heads in agreement. But all along, they've probably been thinking about other things: what they were going to eat after Mass, what game was on later that day, etc. I doubt that anyone's mind has been changed on contraceptives.

Can you imagine a conversation like this?

"Gee, Honey, the priest sure made a lot of sense today when he talked about birth control."

"I agree; maybe we should rethink what we've been doing."

No, if you're a Catholic, chances are that you would talk to practically anyone else about birth control than your priest. In fact, it probably wouldn't even cross your mind.

And if you had a problem -- any problem -- I'd bet you would seek out the advice of a therapist before you would consult a member of the clergy. Why would I go talk to a priest or a minister?, you'd probably ask.

And I doubt that was the case fifty or a hundred years ago.