Education Quote by William P. Leahy

“Clearly” does a lot of work here: it signals authority before the argument even arrives. Leahy, speaking as an educator, isn’t just describing a disagreement with church teaching; he’s framing the disagreement as a comprehension problem. The move is subtle but strategic. If critics “don’t understand,” their objections can be treated less as principled dissent and more as a fixable deficit - something to be corrected through instruction, formation, or better messaging.

The second clause tightens the frame: “or they think it’s so limiting.” That “or” offers a narrow menu of motives, both convenient. Either people are uninformed, or they’re reacting emotionally to perceived constraint. Missing is the third possibility: that someone understands the teaching precisely and still finds it ethically troubling, socially harmful, or simply incompatible with their lived experience. By excluding that option, the quote protects the institution from having to meet critique on equal intellectual footing.

Contextually, this sounds like a response to recurring flashpoints where church doctrine collides with modern expectations - sexuality, gender roles, divorce, reproductive rights, even academic freedom in Catholic institutions. Leahy’s subtext is pastoral and managerial at once: the church is being misunderstood, and the solution is clarification, not change. “Limiting” becomes a rhetorical battleground: to the church, limits can mean discipline and coherence; to outsiders, they can look like control. The intent is to rebrand constraint as structure, and to cast resistance as misreading rather than indictment.