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Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
LETTERS
July/August 2005
REPORT THE FACTS
If you would like to report the facts about the Legionaries, I suggest that you visit www.legionaryfacts.com and offer this web site to your readers in response to the web site that you offered in your May issue [See News, May 2005].
Mary Hutten,
Thousand Oaks
GO GET ANOTHER JOB
The right to dissent from the teachings of the Catholic Church had been well established long ago. History remembers this as the Protestant Reformation.
Father Richard McBrien succeeds in defining the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism in his apologia for Catholic dissent, titled "The New Pope's Paper Trail," in the May 20, 2005, issue of the Tidings [the newspaper of the archdiocese of Los Angeles]. These differences are "the teachings and disciplinary decrees on contraception, ordination of women, obligatory celibacy for priests of the Roman rite, or the admission of divorced-and-remarried Catholics to the reception of Holy Communion."
Protestant denominations of the twenty-first century can be defined precisely by their dissent from the Catholic teaching on one or more of the issues Father McBrien describes.
The last issue on Father McBrien's list, "the admission of divorced-and-remarried Catholics to the reception of Holy Communion," struck home. I know of a couple who approached a Catholic priest for advice about receiving communion, since they were not married in the Church due to a previous marriage-and-divorce. The parish priest said that "freedom of conscience" allowed them to receive. Another couple I know of who are not married to one another, although one of them is still married to someone else, also receive communion.
Catholic priests approached for advice about Holy Communion by couples not validly and sacramentaly married in the Church should invite them to come forward for a blessing at communion time. Priests who substitute their personal mores for the teaching of the Catholic Church would be acting acceptably if they were Protestant ministers. Private interpretation is the mainstay of Protestantism. To remain Catholic priests, however, they need some serious in-service training. Or else go get another job.
Lila Cuajunco,
Torrance