"It hasn't dimmed my spirit," Dellaporta, a New London native and 1964 graduate of St. Bernard High School, said Saturday at his home on Hangman Hill Road. "If anything, I feel bad for the priests I've known all my life and for all the priests who've done so much good work all over the world."

Reports that some bishops covered up the abuse and simply moved guilty priests to new parishes are upsetting, Dellaporta said, but he doesn't believe the scandal will shake the allegiance of Roman Catholics to their church.

Marie St. Pierre of Vemon (top) and Pat Kluepfel of North Stonington, (bottom) pray Saturday night at St. Thomas More Church in North Stonington.

"The church will be stronger when this is all over," he said. "The church has had scandals centuries ago, but it has always come back stronger."

Allegations of cover-ups of sexual misconduct by priests have surfaced across the United States, including in the Diocese of Bridgeport and the archdioceses of Boston and New York.

The Bridgeport diocese paid 26 victims $15 million last March to drop lawsuits involving six priests. In Boston, the archdiocese has paid $15 million to more than 100 people, all victims of one priest who allegedly molested at least 130 children as he was moved from parish to parish.

The Rev. V. Antony Alaharasan, church pastor, sprinkles Holy Water on parishioners during Saturday's Palm Sunday eve Mass.

Some have blamed the scandal on the church's requirement that priests remain celibate, saying that it has forced priests' sexual behavior underground. An editorial in the Boston archdiocese's newspaper this month called for the church to consider allowing priests to marry.

Local Catholics attending Palm Sunday services this weekend received a message from Norwich Bishop Daniel A. Hart expressing sadness and shame over the scandals and reassuring parishioners that the diocese has for years followed a policy of reporting allegations of sexual abuse to criminal authorities.

Four lawsuits filed in the last decade have named the Diocese of Norwich as a co-defendant in sexual abuse cases involving priests. Two are still pending.

In North Stonington, Bill and Mary Holub attended Mass Saturday evening at St. Thomas More Church. They expressed outrage that church officials in Boston and elsewhere have allowed guilty priests to continue serving, and sadness that the actions of so few have tarnished the reputation of the church.

"We have known so many wonderful priests," said Mary Holub, who has served on St. Thomas More's parish council. She and her husband, both 83, have served as lectors and Eucharistic ministers at the church. He was president of the Catholic Press Association, a national organization, in the late 1960s.

"I can't imagine why some of the bishops chose to hide this stuff," said Bill Holub. "It would have been so much better for the church to handle it right from the beginning, but they were probably worried about Rome."

Some bishops may have worried about how the Vatican would react to revealing the cases of abuse, he said.

The Holubs said they would welcome a decision to let priests marry, but they don't believe it would prevent those few corrupt priests from molesting children. Celibacy and pedophilia have nothing to do with each other, they said.

The impulse to molest children is a psychological sickness, like alcoholism, they said. It occurs among married men and people in all walks of life.

They also stressed that sexual misconduct is not unique to the Catholic church. Mary Holub cited a 1996 study by an Episcopalian history and religion professor that claims there is no evidence to suggest pedophilia is more common among Catholics than among other clergy.

Like Dellaporta, the Holubs said they aren't about to let the latest sex scandals shake their faith in the church, and they don't think the rest of the country's 62 million Catholics will, either.

"I've got to handle my faith in my own way and I can't expect anybody else to do it for me," Mary Holub said, "not a priest, not a nun, not anyone. I have to live out my faith in Jesus in my own way."

"I've been a Catholic for 83 years," she added, "and the church has played a very important role in my life. That doesn't mean I've always agreed with everything it's done, but I can't imagine not being Catholic."

It is time, she said, for pastors to begin talking with their parishioners. "If a problem affects the family, you'd expect the mother and father to address it at the dinner table," she said, "and the church is a special family."

Fellow St. Thomas More parishioners Neil and Pat Kluepfel agreed that celibacy isn't to blame for the sexual misconduct of priests, but they said allowing married priests could cure the problem by giving the church a larger pool of potential priests to choose from.

Ordaining women as priests would help, too, they said. Some liberal Catholics will observe Monday as a world day of prayer for women's ordination.

"The church has created a scarcity of candidates for the priesthood," Neil Kluepfel said. "They may not be accepting just anybody, but they can't be as selective as they should be if they've excluded most of the population."

With a shortage of priests in the United States, some bishops might feel pressured to return priests who have molested children to service instead of forcing them to leave the ministry, Neil Kluepfel said.

The Kluepfels, both in their 70s, believe most of the nation's Catholics are ready to accept women and married men as priests. Pat Kluepfel was a nun for 22 years before leaving her religious order and later marrying.

She and her husband ran Twenty-Third Publications in Mystic, a Catholic publishing business, for 33 years until they sold it 1999. The company published a book in 1990, "Slayer of the Soul," which addressed the topic of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

The Kluepfels named their business for Pope John XXIII, who presided over the Vatican II council between 1962 and 1965. Vatican II promised more openness and participation by the laity in the church, valuable lessons for Catholics to remember now, they said.

"This (scandal) has strengthened my feeling," Neil Kluepfel said, "that if we had a church that revolved around the laity instead of the hierarchy of the clergy, so much of this could have been prevented."

With more say among the laity, he said, the American church would have heard by now the call to ordain married men and women. Ideally, he said, the American church and the dioceses within it should decide for themselves whether to remove the requirement of celibacy.

"If a situation becomes so serious in terms of a shortage of clergy, each national hierarchy might look at itself and say, 'We have a problem here, we plan to solve it, and we don't care what Rome says."

mcostanza@theday.com