Pastor John Hagee has extended an olive branch to Catholics in the form of an apology letter addressed to Bill Donohue. Donohue--a lay person and self-appointed spokesman for the Catholic Church-- is likely to accept the apology and major media will report that Hagee's "Catholic problem" has been solved.

They shouldn't.

As a Catholic, I appreciate that Hagee took time to clarify his comments about my Church, but he didn't go far enough. Catholics talk a lot about forgiveness--we even have a pretty formalized process for it--and while I'm in no position to judge what's in Pastor Hagee's heart, his apology letter wouldn't fly in the confessional.

As a Catholic, I was taught that in order to receive forgiveness you have to 1) make a full confession and 2) mean it. Hagee's letter is unconvincing on both counts.

Absent from his apology was any sense of remorse for his appalling anti-gay and anti-Muslim statements. While the Catholic Church doesn't have a record of standing up for gay rights, it doesn't care much for hate speech or taking cheap shots at disadvantaged communities.

And while I'm doing my best to refrain from picking at the speck in Hagee's eye (Lord knows I have some planks in my own), I struggle with accepting Hagee's stated commitment to the "common good' and defending "the rights of the poor" as sincere.

For all his lip service to Catholic values, after watching this video -- in which, among other things, he says the unemployed can STARVE -- you'd be hard pressed to see how Hagee and Catholics share the same idea of the preferential option for the poor--a central component of Catholic Social Teaching.:

Hagee's letter might be good enough for Bill Donohue, a partisan operative who'll be more than happy to go back to attacking Democrats full-time, but it's not good enough for me.

While Catholics have been victims of bias and discrimination in the past, most contemporary anti-Catholic attacks (like Hagee's) tend to sound more nutty than truly threatening, so it was hard for me to get too worked up over Hagee's Reformation-era rants. Nonetheless, bigotry is bigotry.

While I pray for the grace to forgive John Hagee, I'll be thinking of my Muslim and GLBT brothers and sisters who still face the threat of violent hate-crimes and other discrimination every day.

They deserve an apology much more than me, and until they get one, this Catholic will still have a Hagee problem.