To the Editor:
Full disclosure: my wife is a practicing Catholic. My youthful religious pedigree is Unitarian, perhaps the closest we come in the U.S. to amiable spirituality with handsome churches. Having spent some years now reading the ancients and St. Augustine and on to C.S. Lewis, Crocker, and Strobel, it is clear that the Catholic and some evangelical churches are the living core of Christian faith in America.
So, to the point: your apparent “new and improved” Rhode Island Catholic is excellent for its Commentary and columns. It is a treat when it arrives in the mail. In the April 10 issue, for example, the Editorial (“Keep Jesus at the heart of immigration debate”) is solid counsel. While I disagree entirely with the “triangulation” above the issue of mere legality, this is what Church teaching would prescribe and, thus, needs to be said.
The Rev. Joseph Lennon’s piece asking if the faith is too demanding is refreshingly blunt. My wife and I marvel as we watch the traditional (including Catholic) churches develop new strategies to be more welcoming, non-judgmental, and inoffensive to emptier houses of... well, often not worship. Happy gathering? Brief sense of community? Undemanding spiritual certification? As an aside, his point of Islam’s grip on the faithful is well-taken, but the inflexible comprehensiveness of faith has left the necessary political development arrested in a primitive and destructive stage.
Sr. Patricia McCarthy’s piece on sin – the indulgence has a thousand fathers, the penance is an orphan – was delicious. One can picture Sr. McCarthy giving a fire-and-brimstone talk with this as her theme. Amazing when you think of how central sin was in the thinking (public and private) of many of the Founders, and how reduced its acknowledged standing today. She has a skillful grasp on the answer, and it is not a comforting pat on the shoulder, it is a rap upside the head.
Last, Fr. John Kiley’s worthwhile “Quiet Corner” (“Our ancestors knew the value of uncompromised truth”) is more discomfort dispensed. Priests are not to be social justice cheerleaders, group-sing leaders, or parish representatives of Oprah’s book club. He uses the world “discipline,” for God’s sake. Does the man not know this is the post-Vatican II, updated, not-your-parents’ church? Can words like prudence, respect, and responsibility be far behind? We all know how dangerous truth can be; perhaps that is why it is so absent in our public discourses today.
Keep it up! Even to us among the unwashed, it is a cool drink for the soul.
Thomas Linehan
Foster
