Four weeks ago I had intended to do a column on a topic that had exercised many talking-heads on television and pundits in the press, and that had, in the process, unleashed a torrent of moralistic commentary beyond most people's capacity to absorb.

Many readers would have recognized this as an allusion to the controversy over the patently racist and sexist remark made by radio and television personality Don Imus a few weeks earlier. His target was the predominantly African-American Rutgers' women's basketball team that had made it, against the odds, to the NCAA championship game with the University of Tennessee.

In the meantime, however, we suffered the worst episode of mass murder in the history of the United States, with the killings at Virginia Tech in mid-April.

I suspect that only a tiny minority of my readers had ever watched or listened to the "Imus in the Morning" program, broadcast weekdays on a host of radio stations across the country from 6 to 10 a.m., and simulcast on MSNBC from 6 until 9 a.m. In fact, I doubt if most of Imus' outraged critics had ever heard of him before the matter came to public attention.

Imus was in my home state of Connecticut recently --- at the R. J. Julia book store in Madison --- to help his wife Deirdre promote her new book, "Green This!", on environmentally-friendly ways of doing one's house-cleaning. Imus himself is a staunch supporter of environmental (and many other worthy) causes, and promoted them frequently on his morning program. Which leads me to the point of this column.

No reader needs to be persuaded that racist and sexist remarks have no place in our private conversation, much less on the public airwaves. Don Imus was wrong in what he had said about the Rutgers women's basketball team. There is no excusing him for it, and he made none for himself.

Indeed, he met with the entire team and their coach at the governor's mansion in New Jersey (the night the governor, racing to the same meeting, was seriously injured in an auto accident). After two or three hours of often emotional conversation, the young women accepted Mr. Imus' apology.

In most situations, however, that would have brought the matter to an end. CBS (his primary employer) and NBC (which provided the simulcast on MSNBC) might have imposed a penalty (initially, it was to be a two-week suspension), with Imus eventually returning to the airwaves.

But that was not to be. In the meantime, the Reverend Al Sharpton, a candidate for the presidency of the United States in 2004 and a controversial figure in his own right, got involved in the case and became the point man in urging sponsors to boycott Imus' program. To be sure, others, including several African-American employees at NBC, joined in the protest and demanded that Imus be fired.

Sponsors began bailing out and NBC changed its original penalty from a two-week suspension to outright cancellation of the program, even though it was earning the network millions of dollars a year and its ratings were on the increase. CBS quickly followed suit.

I should say here parenthetically that I have never been invited to appear on the "Imus in the Morning" program, nor would that have even been conceivable, given the pre-Vatican II mentality of its producer and guest-booker, Bernard McGuirk.

McGuirk himself is a study in contrasts. Although "traditional" in his understanding of Catholicism and defensive of the Church, he did a regular, usually bawdy lampoon of New York's Cardinal Egan, complete with a Fed-Ex cap serving as a makeshift miter.

It was McGuirk who may have led Imus down the path to his ill-fated remark, having made the initial racist crack about the Rutgers women, but only after Imus himself had referred to the Rutgers players as "rough girls" with tatoos. His characteristic reaction to McGuirk's comment would normally have been, "That will be fine." Instead, he chimed in with a damaging follow-up of his own.

It was unfortunate that Mr. Sharpton took the lead in bringing Imus down, because he has heavy baggage of his own to carry --- most recently his derogatory, on-air remark about Mormons, but more infamously his involvement in the 20-year-old Tawana Brawley case in which six men, some of them police officers, were falsely accused of rape. To this day, Sharpton has never admitted any wrong-doing in the Brawley matter, much less apologized for it.

In the end, the Rutgers players did the right thing in accepting Imus' apology, and Imus did the right thing in apologizing to them face-to-face. Enduring lessons for us all.

Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.