India, Aug. 17 -- Last Sunday, at a parish church in Piramadam, something happened inside the sanctuary - the sanctum sanctorum, the space set apart in every Christian tradition as the dwelling-place of the Real Presence - that no believer, and indeed no person of conscience, whether of faith or none, can pass over in silence. Two young priests, ordained to stand at that altar as servants of the Word and the Sacrament, were drawn into an unseemly confrontation within its walls.

What troubles me more than the act itself is what appears to lie behind it: reports that these young men were set against one another by their own superiors - men entrusted with episcopal authority - who seem to have forgotten, if only for a moment, the "fear and...