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At Tim Russert's Kennedy Center memorial, members of the Westboro Baptist Church picketed and held placards cursing the beloved Meet the Press host for his Catholicism and tolerance of homosexuality.

Something tells me that today, as hundreds weep not two hundred yards from my office, is not the day to say something nice about the most reviled family in America. But when is the day? Every year, the followers of the Reverend Fred Phelps protest hundreds of funerals -- mostly the funerals of soldiers -- and each set of mourners deserves better that to have anti-gay fanatics waving signs denouncing them as "fags" and "fag-enablers" (a category that apparently captures everyone but the Westboro members themselves). The bereaved Russerts certainly do. I sympathize with the woman who stopped her car and asked a passerby to run over and snatch away the "Russert in Hell" sign. But if we must choose one funeral as an occasion to rectify the public's ignorance of the Phelpses' bizarre history, it might even seem fitting that the occasion would be the death of a man recognized as an emblem of truth-seeking and setting records straight.

NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert died Friday. He was 58.

With Russert's passing, the country loses one of its most influential journalists -- host of Meet The Press, debate moderator, and trend-setter. He was a model for other, lesser hosts. Russert's signature innovation was to ditch the staid, respectful interviewing method implicit in a title like Meet The Press (as if the program were a social brunch) in favor of a more aggressive, at times bullying, in-your-face style. With the shift in approach came a change in style -- away from the classic television personality's search for patrician authority in favor of a newfound quest for working class authenticity.

Newspapers reported that Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, an official in the Vatican office that oversees confession and conscience, had listed seven new "social sins" of the modern world.

Now that the very idea of sin and penitence seems hopelessly Old Europe, the earnest moral language of Catholicism -- sin, virtue, evil, salvation -- lends itself easily to caricature. The bishop gave an interview early this month, and by Monday, journalists had distilled his thoughts into tabloid headlines: "Seven new deadly sins: are you guilty?" and "Pope Identifies Seven New Sins!" The articles claimed Girotti's ad-hoc list expanded or even (in more grievous misinterpretations) replaced the familiar litany of deadly sins -- pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth -- codified by Pope Gregory the Great in the late 6th Century, fine-tuned by Aquinas in the 13th, and popularized by Dante in the 14th. But even those seven were less "sins" than categories of impropriety, attitudes that could lead to spiritually destructive personal behavior. MORE