Wisconsin FFRF member Ken Proulx, who is 90, notes, "The pope was saying it's wrong to kill in the name of God. Why, the Catholic Church got where it is by killing people, with a history as black as the ace of spades. In Spain alone, 25,000 people were killed during the Inquisition."
Ken counts among "the best years of my life" his public school education in a one-room schoolhouse in the Midwest, where the teacher paid him 50¢ a week in 1935 to be "janitor" and keep the woodstove fed and cleaned.
"The worst years of my life" were spent in parochial school in the third and fourth grades. Ken called it "an injustice" and still remembers the sharp sting of the nun's pointer on pupils' hands.