With the greatest respect, Archbishop Dolan, I have to say I completely disagree with your attack on Maureen Dowd.

Dolan, whose blog is called "The Gospel in the Digital Age," denounced Dowd's column in The New York Times last week as an "intemperate" and "scurrilous" "diatribe."

Dowd's crime? She had the temerity to question why women religious — nuns — are still treated as second-class citizens by the Church. She could have widened the discussion to ask why the Church treats all women as second-class citizens, but she confined it to nuns, saying the Vatican was trying to herd this elderly population back into their "old-fashioned habits and convents."

She pointed out how nuns, for the most part, were ministering to the poor and vulnerable, while a plague of pedophilia ran unchecked through the Church.

For this, Dolan accused Dowd of "digging deep in to the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription — along with every other German teenage boy — into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans."

Ouch.

So, you go back to read Dowd's column, and you wonder if the Archbishop hasn't temporarily taken leave of his senses.

Dowd's first mention of Pope Benedict is in the fifth paragraph, in which she identifies him as the author of a 2004 Vatican document which "urged women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating 'feminine values' like 'listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting'.”

I don't know about anyone else reading this, but "humility" and "waiting" might be wonderful  traits in a dog, or even a cat — but they're not values I would urge a young woman to cultivate.

In fact, qualities like "humility" and "waiting" have probably contributed to keeping women's earnings pegged at 77 percent of men's, with a national average of $45,556 for men and $35,471 for women.

Yes, she also revisits Benedict's conscripted history in the Hitler Youth, but only in the context of his pardon for the bishop who claimed there were no Nazi gas chambers.

For the most part, the article covers the many ways in which nuns have been admonished for their "uppity" attempts to push the Church forward.

And she quotes a man who says: “It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the Church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”

Dolan calls Dowd's column "anti-Catholic," but what on earth is anti-Catholic about asking the same questions that women have been raising in the Catholic Church for generations — if not centuries?

Why are women second-class citizens in the Church? Why can't we become priests? Why can't priests be married?

And how can the Archbishop of New York accuse Maureen Dowd of damaging the Church, when the greatest damage ever inflicted on the Church has been done from within — by its own male priests?

Dolan could have started a national conversation about womens' role in the 21st century Church.

The pity is he failed to do so. He probably thinks he's put an uppity woman in her place.