Sensing A Trend? Penelope Cruz Ditched Tom Cruise Over Scientology

Tom Cruise should perhaps realize something by now, unless divorce court is his idea of a Sunday stroll in the park: something sours a relationship once? OK, you hooked the wrong fish in a big sea. Happens twice? Hmm. Third relationship floats tits-up? Please understand, Tom, it's not them. It's you.

The pictures of Tom Cruise's romances going sour as three-month-old milk just keep getting clearer in the wake of Katie Holmes divorcing him. In the wake of Nicole Kidman's revelations that the short leash the Church of Scientology keeps the half-pint blockbuster on dismantled her family life, Perez Hilton claims Penélope Cruz's three-year love affair was similarly decided by her-versus-Scientology.

She reportedly goes so far as to call Cruise's fringe faith "the third wheel" between her and her "Vanilla Sky" co-star lover.

"Tom had absolutely planned on proposing to Penélope, and they had openly discussed marriage during the three yeras they were dating," a source claims. "Tom was head-over-heels in love with Penélope and could see them spending the rest of their lives together, and she felt the same way. However, Penélope pulled the plug on the relationship because she felt that the Church of Scientology was the third wheel in their relationship."

The Spanish beauty isn't going so far as to take a stand firmly "against" her ex's chosen beliefs. In fact, his commitment is a source of her admiration for him.

"Penélope doesn't have anything against the Church, but it just wasn't her thing," the source continued. "She admired Tom's dedication to it, but it wasn't her cup of tea and wasn't something she wanted to give her life up for."

Let's be clear: it's not fair in any sense to ask someone else to give up something as firmly rooted in that person's identity as a certain faith or belief system because a person believes in something else. It's wiser to do as Cruz did and just walk away. That would be that, if instances such as this were as simple as Cruise's splits get.

Yeah, they're not.

Cruz's revelations come hot on the heels of a revealing Vanity Fair article alleging that Church officials have long been in the ears of Nicole Kidman and Cruise's two adopted children, 19-year-old Isabella and 17-year-old Connor, dubbing her a "suppressive person" who means harm to the Church. Kidman has distanced herself completely from the Church since her and Cruise's 2001 divorce.

"They rejected Nicole - they've been instructed," claimed former Scientologist and Church leader David Miscavige's one-time bodyguard John Brousseau. He further claimed that because of Kidman's labeling by the church, her adopted son and daughter told him, "We hate going and seeing her."

Rumor has always had it that prior to Cruise's whirlwind romance with Holmes, the Church "auditioned" several supposedly ideal candidates for marriage to the "Mission: Impossible" star, including an uninterested Scarlett Johansson. As far as Cruz is concerned, Cruise's people have called the allegations "ridiculously false."

Then again, Cruise's off-beat nature has lent itself to more than one instance of the truth being just a hair stranger than anything anybody could bother to make up. Anyway, so Oprah's couch and Matt Lauer both tell us.